Trespassen House once had a picture-postcard quality, but it has vanished, swallowed up in decay and rot. There could be no quick claims here-no slipping back to Brighton to strategically lose touch with her supposed relatives.įrom the mystery behind the names-Maggie, Maude, and Margarida-to Trespassen's overgrown grounds, to Edward's exasperation at Mitzi's whispered remarks as she holds Hal close, Hal attempts to lay bare the dark Westaway family secrets. The reality feels like a terrifying millstone weighing her down, and she struggles to free herself from what she has done.

The words whirl in Hal's head, mingling with the yammering voices of the three brothers. There's no way Hal can escape from the fury in Harding's eye as he speaks of lawsuits and contested wills and private detectives.

Hal's mind twists all the possibilities in order to find a way to make the tenuous connection work. While sons Harding, Abel, and Ezra remain skeptical, Mitzi, Harding's wife, tries to make Hal feel welcome. But what would Hal's beloved tarot cards say about Trespassen House and the woman who was not her grandmother? Warren accuses Hal of being happy enough to come down 'picking like magpies over the spoils now.' There are human flaws aplenty as Hal tries to make the image fit with what everyone wants to hear. With her mouth set in a thin line of pinched disapproval, Mrs. Later, at Trespassen House, she's introduced to the officious housekeeper, Mrs. Arriving on the train from Brighton to Penzance, Hal meets her new family. While the mystery behind Hal's inheritance lies at the heart of Ware's novel, much of what keeps us turning the pages are Hal's struggles to play the part of dutiful granddaughter. The money's not hers and she can't claim it, though a little voice tells her: 'you could claim this money, you know. Hal is good at reading people and perceptive enough to understand what it was her mother hadn't said: she's most certainly not a Westaway. At night she returns to the chilly darkness of her attic flat in the Marine View Villas where she thinks about her mother, who died two years previously, the growing stack of bills, and the vicious two typed notes that were recently hand-delivered to her.

Hal has inherited a substantial estate, though she has no connection to Trespassen House, a rambling country estate in Cornwall and the ancestral home of Hester Westaway.īy day, Hal attends to her booth on Brighton's West Pier, where she reads fortunes with tarot cards. The author fills her narrative with Hal's sudden stay of execution in the form of letter from Penzance solicitor Robert Treswick.

It's possible to describe Ware's tale while conveying nothing of this story's steady accumulation of dread. Book review: Ruth Ware's *The Death of Mrs.

The death of mrs westaway book review