Sarah Mac’s Reviews > The Secrets of Blackthorn House > Status Update

Not that these creeps don’t deserve to die, but this vengeful climax feels like a mashup of Raiders of the Lost Ark + The Last Crusade. 🤔

Peter’s insanity & cruelty might have more impact if he hadn’t toggled into Villain Mode like a light switch being flipped. No subtlety whatsoever—it happened literally between one page & the next, & now he’s a psycho cartoon that you know won’t survive the finale because he’s so utterly OTT.

I love how Evelyn thinks her husband won’t find out that she & her maid have dosed their driver/bodyguard with laudanum & are snooping around the rickety little village that grovels in terror of her husband’s family. I mean…duuuuur. 🤓

The setting is fabulous, like Hammer horror meets Crimson Peak meets Turn of the Screw. I’m not sold on the characters, though; heroine seems like a non-entity & the husband is an absentee villain thus far. 🤔 Proceeding to Chapter 3……

Hm. Seems a little “tell not show,” but I just finished a 1st-person novel, so that might be my brain having trouble shifting back to 3rd-person. (But I’m pretty sure housekeepers were dubbed with an honorary Mrs regardless of their marriage status, esp if they were old enough to be turning gray. 🧐 In any case, a housekeeper named Ms Farrow feels overly modern.)

Never tried anything from this publisher before, so we’ll see how it goes.