I Just Can't Bear the Suspense...

When I read suspense fiction, I want to be so enthralled that I can barely manage to put the book down. Jennifer McMahon’s new suspense novel, The Winter People, grabs the reader from the first sentence of Sara Harrison Shea’s diary in 1908, “The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old.” You can’t help but wonder just what a sleeper might be and why is Sara seeing one? Sara’s story, told through the diary, is connected to the present by the family living in her farmhouse on the edge of a menacing woods in the little town of West Hall, Vermont. Sara was found horribly murdered behind the house just a few months after the heartbreaking death of her little girl, Gertie. Now Alice and her daughters Ruthie and Fawn live there, living a simple life isolated from our all too connected society.

Nineteen-year-old Ruthie can’t believe her parents chose to live in this little town, cut off from everything and everyone. Ruthie can’t wait to get out of West Hall, where the most famous resident is Sara, believed to be a crazy woman by most of the town thanks to the revelations in The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea published by her niece after Sara's death. The isolation proves problematic when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that her mother has simply vanished. Desperate to avoid the official consequences of her mother’s disappearance, Ruthie searches for clues to Alice’s whereabouts. She is surprised to find a copy of Sara’s diary hidden under the floor in her mother’s bedroom, missing pages at a crucial point. How is the diary connected to Alice’s disappearance? And, an even more frightening thought, are Sara’s creepy sleepers involved somehow? A growing sense of unease pervades the novel as Ruthie is drawn deeper into the mystery of her mother’s disappearance and the parallels to Sara’s story.

While there are a few too many coincidences in the plot, fans of page-turning suspense novels with a supernatural bent will blaze right through The Winter People. If you enjoy the suspense novels of Chevy Stevens and Sophie Hannah, you should try Jennifer McMahon.

(I'm reading The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh right now. What are you reading?)