Charleston psychic Melanie Middleton discovers the past isn't finished revealing unsettling secrets in the third novel in the New York Times bestselling Tradd Street series.
With her relationship with writer Jack Treholm as shaky as the foundation of her family home, Melanie’s juggling a number of problems. Like restoring her Tradd Street house...and resisting her mother’s pressure to ‘go public’ with her talent—a sixth sense that unites them to the lost souls of the dead. But Melanie never anticipated her new problem.
Her name is Nola, Jack’s estranged young daughter who appears on their doorstep, damaged, lonely and defiantly immune to her father’s attempts to reconnect. Melanie understands the emotional chasm all too well. As a special, bonding gift Jack’s mother buys Nola an antique dollhouse—a precious tableaux of a perfect Victorian family. Melanie hopes the gift will help thaw Nola’s reserve and draw her into the family she’s never known.
At first, Nola is charmed, and Melanie is delighted—until night falls, and the most unnerving shadows are cast within its miniature rooms. By the time Melanie senses a malevolent presence she fears it may already be too late. A new family has accepted her unwitting invitation to move in—with their own secrets, their own personal demons, and a past that’s drawing Nola into their own inescapable darkness...
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Publishers Weekly
White’s third Tradd Street paranormal (after 2009’s The Girl on Legare Street) delivers powerful emotions, weird old Charleston architecture, and a hint of mystery as psychic realtor Melanie Middleton and her boyfriend, bestselling author Jack Trenholm, navigate their treacherous relationship. Nola, Jack’s 13-year-old daughter, adds an extra challenge by arriving on his doorstep from California after her drug-addicted songwriter mother’s suicide, with her mother’s guitar in hand and her mother’s comforting but restless spirit in tow. When sullen Nola becomes haunted by evil spirits living in a beautiful antique dollhouse that Jack’s mother gives her, tracking down the story of the house on which the miniature home is modeled becomes a priority. Charming and complex living characters, combined with unsettled ghosts that balance uncanny creepiness with very human motivations, keep this story warm, real, and exciting. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Praise for New York Times bestselling author Karen White
“There is a rhythm to the writing of Karen White. It has a pace, a beat, a cadence that is all its own.”—The Huffington Post“White’s dizzying carousel of a plot keeps those pages turning, so much so that the book can [be]—and should be—finished in one afternoon, interrupted only by a glass of sweet iced tea.”—Oprah.com
“White captures the true essence of Charleston by intertwining the sights and smells of the historic town with an enchanting story filled with ghostly spirits, love, and forgiveness…a once-in-a-lifetime series.”—Fresh Fiction
“This is storytelling of the highest order: the kind of book that leaves you both deeply satisfied and aching for more.”—Beatriz Williams, New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Little Thing
“Readers will find White’s prose an uplifting experience as she is a truly gifted storyteller.”—Las Vegas Review-Journal
Kirkus Reviews
In the third of White's series starring psychic Realtor Melanie "Mellie" Middleton, Mellie copes with the warring ghostly denizens of another Charleston historic home. Any jokes about her failure to predict the housing bubble aside, Mellie's clairvoyance is more the "Sixth Sense" variety: The dead people she sees are not just any dearly departed. The spirits she wrangles are an occupational hazard of owning "This Old House." As her 40th birthday approaches, Mellie's on-again, off-again flirtation with heartthrob Jack is off: he's dating her cousin, pretty-in-pink Rebecca. Mellie's mother and father, for decades estranged from her and each other, are back in her life, and she and her opera diva mother share ghost-hunting duty. Jack learns he has a 13-year-old daughter, Nola, when the teen lands on his doorstep. Since her mother, singer-songwriter Bonnie (a drug addict who committed suicide), told her that Jack deserted the two of them, Nola doesn't trust her father. (Indeed, his personality is so volatile that readers will wonder why anyone, including Mellie, would.) Nola finds shelter with Mellie, who notices Bonnie hovering nearby. As Mellie tries unsuccessfully to nudge Bonnie toward the light, poltergeists attack the antique dollhouse in Nola's bedroom. And no wonder: The dollhouse is a replica of a decaying mansion on Montagu Street inhabited by the last of the prominent Manigault family, Miss Julia, an ancient piano teacher. Mellie convinces Nola to take music lessons from Julia, and Julia asks Mellie to contact her brother William, who has been dead since 1938, the year that Julia's fiancé Jonathan also died, followed shortly by her parents, Harold and Anne. Ever since, Julia and her house have been haunted by the contentious ghosts of William and Harold. Although her visions of hollow-eyed Harold convince her he's evil, Mellie suspects that Julia herself is no angel, and that merely helping William and Harold to "move on" will not lift the Manigault curse. Additional ghost-sightings would be vastly more entertaining than the tepid romance subplot.
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