The Strangers on Montagu Street (Tradd Street Series #3)

by Karen White

Overview

Psychic realtor Melanie Middleton returns-only to be greeted by a house full of lost souls.

 

Psychic realtor Melanie Middleton is still restoring her Charleston house and doesn't expect to have a new houseguest, a teen girl named Nola. But the girl didn't come alone, and the spirits that accompanied Nola don't seem willing to leave...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101545812
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/01/2011
Series:	Tradd Street Series , #3
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	2,826
File size:	586 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

After playing hooky one day in the seventh grade to read Gone With the Wind, Karen White knew she wanted to be a writer—or become Scarlett O'Hara. In spite of these aspirations, Karen pursued a degree in business and graduated cum laude with a BS in Management from Tulane University. Ten years later, after leaving the business world, she fulfilled her dream of becoming a writer and wrote her first book. In the Shadow of the Moon was published in August, 2000. This book was nominated for the prestigious RITA award in 2001 in two separate categories. Her books have since been nominated for numerous national contests including another RITA, the Georgia Author of the Year Award and in 2008 won the National Readers’ Choice Award for Learning to Breathe.

Karen currently writes what she refers to as ‘grit lit’—southern women’s fiction—and has recently expanded her horizons into writing a mystery series set in Charleston. Her tenth novel, The Lost Hours, will be released in trade paperback by New American Library, a division of Penguin Publishing Group, in April 2009.

Karen hails from a long line of Southerners but spent most of her growing up years in London, England and is a graduate of the American School in London. She currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two teenaged children, and a spoiled Havanese dog (who appears in several of her books), Quincy. When not writing, she spends her time reading, singing, playing piano, chauffeuring children and avoiding cooking.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Kirkus Reviews