October 2020: "The Vanishing" by Wendy Webb

 Kendra picked "The Vanishing" by Wendy Webb for October, one of our favorite authors. And she visited with us during our book club Zoom meeting.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A mysterious visitor with an intriguing offer, a centuries-old mansion in the middle of the wilderness, and a séance gone horribly wrong set the stage for the newest spine-tingling tale about family secrets by bestselling author Wendy Webb.

Just as the recently-widowed Julia Bishop's life is collapsing around her, a stranger appears on her doorstep with an intriguing job offer—he asks Julia to be a companion for his elderly mother, the famous and rather eccentric horror novelist Amaris Sinclair, whom Julia has always admired... and who the whole world thinks is dead. Too intrigued to decline and with nowhere else to turn, Julia packs up her life and accepts the position, hoping she has found her chance to start anew.

But when Julia arrives at the Sinclairs' magnificent, centuries-old estate in the middle of the wilderness near Lake Superior, she begins to suspect her too-good-to-be-true job offer is exactly that. Mysteries and secrets haunt the halls of Havenwood and the forest beyond. Why did Amaris Sinclair choose to vanish from the public eye more than a decade earlier? What are the whispers Julia hears? And why, exactly, was Julia brought to Havenwood in the first place?

For answers, Julia turns to Drew McCullough, the great-grandson of the mysterious Scottish nobleman who built Havenwood. Together, they realize that something very sinister and very close to her own family history is quickening out of the past.

With twists and turns, spine-tingling scenes and a surprise ending you won't see coming, bestselling novelist Wendy Webb has crafted another intricate and addictive tale of gothic suspense that you won't be able to put down!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy Webb is the bestselling, award-winning author of five novels of gothic suspense, The Tale of Halcyon Crane, The Fate of Mercy Alban, The Vanishing, The End of Temperance Dare, Daughters of the Lake, and The Haunting of Brynn Wilder. Since her stories are set in the Great Lakes region, reviewers have dubbed her the Queen of the Northern Gothic.

Wendy lives in Minneapolis, where she's at work on her next novel.