The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon

The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The story is very well paced. I truly had no idea how it would end and how the mysteries would be explained. It begins with Amy, picking up a rifle and climbing the house stairs. In the next scene, Amy is discovered in her own gore, along with her husband and son. All signs point to Amy going crazy and killing her family. There are, however, a few clues to what really happened. The most glaring is that Amy is holding a photo of her mother and aunt as children with the words "29th Room" written on the back. Oh, yeah. There is also one survivor. Amy's 10 year old daughter.

The book covers a few generations. There is Charlotte who immigrated from England to the small U.S. town of London after treating her soon to be husband who then built a motel for them to make their living. It had 28 rooms. There are peripheral facts that never really go anywhere but the main point is that they have two daughters, Sylvie and Rose. Rose is Amy's mother. So then we cover Rose and Sylvie's childhood and the mysteries of their generation which includes a visit from Charlotte's mother from England who tells scary stories to the girls. This is not peripheral.

Then we travel to 1989 when Amy, Piper, and Margot find mysteries for their generation which include the previous mysteries as all things are beginning to come to a head. At last we reach 2013 where we where, without the help of Scooby Doo, we discover it is not Old Man Withers.

Yes, I jest.

The story is well paced and the ending is unexpected. I guess my real reason for only giving it 3 stars is that I just never really liked any of the characters enough to care enough what happened to them. It was a good story but when I was finished, I thought it was a decent escape from reality and a good beach book.