REVIEW: House of Ashes

House of Ashes
Author: Loretta Marion

Cassie Mitchell is 37 and in trouble. She lives in her family's historic Victorian house on Cape Cod...but the house comes with ghosts. Literally. Or bad memories. Or a curse. Whatever you want to call it. Three generations of her family have met with sadness and death because of a long-ago curse placed on the family by an unhappy lover...a lighterman named Robert Toomey. 80 years ago Toomey supposedly started a fire in the house, killing Cassie's great-grandmother Celeste. Percy Mitchell then jumped from the nearby cliffs clutching his dead wife's body, yelling that he was not yet finished with Toomey. Flash forward 80 years....the house is in need of repairs, but Cassie is out of money, in the midst of a divorce, and despondent. She loves Battersea Bluffs at Lavender Hill -- or just The Bluffs as modern residents of Whale Rock, MA call it now -- and doesn't want to lose the house, or the lovely vanilla and caramel scent reminiscent of baking cookies that means the ghosts are about. Mysteriously a young couple and their dog show up one day asking about the house and the legend of the curse. Cassie instantly befriends them. Vince and Ashley start helping renovate the carriage house. Cassie can rent it out and bring in some money to start paying off the debt her ex-husband racked up before leaving. She comes to love them as friends. Then one day Vince and Ashley head out on a biking excursion and never come back. The bikes and picnic basket are found abandoned. She files a missing person report but it seems law enforcement really doesn't want to solve the case. Where are her friends? And why did they just disappear?

I love a good haunted house story! And this one fit the bill perfectly! House of Ashes is a nice mix of mystery and supernatural. The house clearly has a mind, or spirit, of its own. And as Cassie works to find out what happened to her friends, she learns more about the background of the house, her family, and the curse. She also has to battle small town gossip. Nobody really wants to find the young couple. The residents of Whale Rock don't trust outsiders and seem glad they are gone. The local police are pulled off the case by the FBI. And the FBI doesn't seem all that interested in solving the matter.

I enjoyed Cassie as a main character. She is intelligent and learning to stand on her own and fight for what she wants in life. She's creative -- a very talented painter. Plus Cassie is loyal and determined. She isn't just going to let this go and forget about the two people who stayed with her for four months and helped her at her lowest.

On the front cover of House of Ashes it says "A Haunted Bluffs Mystery'' so I'm assuming this is the first book in a series. I will definitely be reading more books by this author -- and more books about Battersea Bluffs, if this does turn out to be a continuing series. This story was perfectly paced and nicely suspenseful. There were plenty of twisty developments to keep me guessing what the final outcome would be. I binge read this book in one sitting -- I couldn't put it down. I had to know how it ended!

Loretta Marion is the author of another unrelated suspense novel, The Fool's Truth. I've added it to my tbr stack! I like her writing style and will definitely be watching for more by this author.

**I voluntarily read an advanced readers copy of this book from Crooked Lane via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**