The Lake House - Kate Morton

On a recommendation from my sister - who almost never steers me wrong - I picked up The Lake House, as I was in need of a new audio book for training for this 1/2 marathon (two more weeks folks).  I was a bit astonished to see a run time of 21 hours though! To put this in perspective, my average book for running is about 10-11 hours. This meant I'd be "reading" this for about three weeks. (Actually it took me more than a month - ouch).

So I settled in for a long story. And it was long. But also good. I liked the writing, even when Morton did get a little long winded. The story is framed by Sadie Sparrow, a London detective who is on administrative leave following a press leak regarding an investigations she was assigned to looking into the disappearance of Maggie Bailey.

As a concession to her partner, Sadie goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandfather, Bertie on holiday. She can't get the Bailey case out of her mind and wonders if it has anything to do with a recent letter she received from the baby she gave up for adoption as a teenager. Layers of several mysteries that are woven together.

To distract herself from all of this, Sadie takes up a keen interest in the Lake House she discovers while running. Turns out that the family that lived there moved shortly after a tragedy in 1933. The tragedy? The disappearance of an 11 month old boy, Theo.

The story then vacillates between Sadie's story in 2003, to 1933 and before told through the eyes of Alice and Elinor Edyvane (yeah sorry, I'm not sure if I'm spelling that right, I only listened to the book). It turns out Theo's disappearance hinges on the family secrets of several of the Edyvane family's individual members. The story gives away just enough to keep you guessing throughout, until the end, when it all starts to fall together and the reader has quite the jump start on Sparrow. I started to lament that she might not be a very good detective after all.

While Morton is certainly long on supposition and story-telling to the point where you don't really care to hear all the details of the moth eaten area rug that serves no purpose in plot - what she does end up giving you is very full character development. Sadie, Alice and Elinor are complete characters, with back story, motivation, failures, character flaws and all the rest. So the completion of the novel - a rounding up of both the Edyvane and Bailey cases, while maybe a bit eye-rollingly coincidental and predictable, is none-the-less very satisfying.

4/5 Stars.