The Winters by Lisa Gabriele #thewinters @lisagabriele #romance #mystery #allusion #longisland #penguingroupviking @absltmom

It’s here once again, the best day of the work week has arrived and none too soon. Today, I am happy to bring you a review of a book one of my best book friends, Jan and I read together. It’s entitled The Winters and both of us enjoyed this retelling, with modern images, of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Life has been pretty sad for our unnamed protagonist. She is alone, working a dead end job, and employed by a termagant boss in the Cayman Islands. She seems to be at a virtual dead end and then someone wonderful happens. Max, a senator from New York, enters her life and a bit of a whirlwind romance takes place. It is the stuff of fairy tales really. This young woman, only twenty six, meets this charismatic man and he whisks her off her feet and “carries” her back to his beloved mansion Asherly on Long Island. There is only one problem…his teenage daughter, Dani. She is destined to make Max’s young girlfriend, soon to be wife, miserable with an attitude and a manner that is both caustic and possibly deadly. For Dani so misses her mother, Rebekah, killed in a horrific car accident two years prior, that she takes it upon herself to see that our young woman feels the brunt of that longing for a dead mother.

There are things going on at Asherly. Strange things and as Max, Dani, and Max’s new wife descend into the mystery surrounding Dani and her mother’s death, there are things that come to the surface that are unnerving and dangerous. Why has Max been so secretive and what is it about that green house that makes it an off limits part of the Asherley estate? Will this new wife find out what has happened before fate steps in and finds her at the mercy of Rebekah’s ghost and Dani’s irrational behavior?

Reading this book and discussing it made it was such a great experience. Both Jan and I really liked it and felt it was able to establish a clear line of mystery, suspense and wrapped everything up quite well at the end. So, thank you, Jan for sharing this book with me.

I do recommend it to those who so like a book that while giving a nod to a past book, while setting itself up as quite a wonderful story on its own.

Thank you to Lisa Gabrielle, Penguin Group Viking, and NetGalley for a copy of this intriguing story.

Have to say also that the setting of Long Island did sit quite well with me being a former Long Islander.

https://hookedonhouses.net/2010/04/11/rebecca-going-back-to-manderley-again/

“You may tell the greatest lies and wear a brilliant disguise, but you can’t escape the eyes of the one who sees right through you.”   (Tom Robbins)