The Fate of Mercy Alban

by Wendy Webb

Overview

Grace Alban has spent more than twenty years avoiding her childhood home, the stately Alban House on the shores of Lake Superior, for reasons she would rather forget. But when her mother's unexpected death brings Grace and her teenage daughter back, she finds more is haunting the halls and passageways of Alban House than her own personal demons.

Long-buried family secrets, a packet of old love letters, and a lost manuscript plunge Grace into a decades-old mystery about a scandalous party at Alban House, when a world-famous author took his own life and Grace's aunt disappeared without a trace. The night has been shrouded in secrecy by the powerful Alban family for all of these years. Her mother intended to tell the truth about that night to a reporter on the very day she died--could it have been murder? Or was she a victim of the supposed Alban curse? Grace soon realizes her family secrets tangle and twist as darkly as the mansion's secret passages.

With the help of the disarmingly kind--and attractive--Reverend Matthew Parker, Grace must uncover the truth about her home and its curse before she and her daughter become the next victims.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781401341930
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	02/05/2013
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	662,921
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wendy Webb's first novel, The Tale of Halcyon Crane, was the 2011 winner of the Minnesota Book Award for genre fiction, and an IndieNext Pick from the Independent Booksellers Association, a Midwest Connections Pick from the Midwest Booksellers Association and a Great Lakes, Great Reads Pick from the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association. She lives in northern Minnesota with her spouse, photographer Steve Burmeister, and their Alaskan Malamute, Molly. She is at work on her next novel.

Editorial Reviews

Fans of Webb’s well-received debut, The Tale of Halcyon Crane, may feel let down by her similar-in-outline sophomore effort, about a legendary curse that haunts the powerful Alban family’s mansion by Lake Superior. When divorced mother Grace Alban returns to the mansion after her mother’s death, she finds letters revealing her mother’s affair with famous writer David Coleville, who committed suicide during the same 1956 solstice party from which Grace’s aunt, Fate Alban, disappeared. While searching for a lost Coleville novel she believes will clarify the past, Grace is imperiled by the mansion’s malevolent presences, an obsessed journalist and an emotionally disturbed woman who may be Fate. Hidden passageways, magical spell books, resurrections from the dead, sudden disappearances, secret births: amid a welter of gothic staples, the central ghost story concerning Fate and her mysterious twin, Mercy, gets lost. Grace, her love interest, and the privileged world she revisits are pleasant but generic, as is the rediscovered manuscript described as literary genius. Agent: Jennifer Weltz, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

In 1956, a summer solstice party at the Alban family's elegant manor ends abruptly with the suicide of a renowned writer and the disappearance of Mercy Alban. The family closes ranks, and the secrets of that night lie hidden. In the decline of old age, Adele Alban has decided to break the silence and reveal what she remembers about that night to a journalist. Before she can do so, however, she also disappears, only to be found in the garden, dead. Her daughter Grace Alban had left the ancestral home on the shores of Lake Superior 20 years ago, escaping the waters that had murderously claimed the lives of her brothers and the guilt surrounding her father's suicide in those same waters. Recently divorced and with her teenage daughter, Amity, in tow, Grace is quickly engaged by funeral arrangements, a task made less mournful by the attractive Reverend Matthew Parker. Soon, Grace discovers a cache of old love letters. Written to Adele, the letters not only reveal a secret love affair, but also tell of a lost novel about life at Alban House the summer before the tragic party. More sinisterly, the letters suggest that the very wood constructing Alban House is bespelled and the family witched. And when a frightening and possibly mad woman crashes the funeral, accompanied by the reporter Adele had intended to meet, the curse of the Alban family can no longer be ignored. Webb (The Tale of Halcyon Crane, 2010) plots a tale rife with dark family secrets, hidden passageways, love, intrigue and witchcraft. Yet, the telling of the tale falls flat. Supernatural entities do invade the Albans' lives, but the tale lacks a sustained gothic atmosphere of evil forces gathering and conspiring. Less haunted house than detective story.

Kirkus Reviews