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From the bestselling author of The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and Secrets of Eden, comes a riveting and dramatic ghost story. In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts. The home's new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his 70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine failure. Unlike the Miracle on the Hudson, however, most of the passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine – a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door. Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in this sparsely populated White Mountain village – self-proclaimed herbalists – and their interest in her fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous? The result is a poignant and powerful ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have come to expect from bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian: a palpable sense of place, an unerring sense of the demons that drive us, and characters we care about deeply. The difference this time? Some of those characters are dead.
Publication Year: 2011
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0I love a good thriller and Chris Bohjalian’s, “Night Strangers,” offers part mystery, part thriller, part horror in this latest book.
Chip & Emily Linton decide to relocate their family of four to a new town in Northern New Hampshire in hopes of a fresh start. Chip was a pilot whose plane had a double engine failure and thirty-nine of his passengers perished. Chip is weighed down with the burden of all the passengers he has lost and knows that a fresh start is just what they need.
When they find a town filled with neighbors who seem to want to include them in their circle, are constantly running food to them, who want to help care for their twin daughters, and all have a love for gardening… well, who wouldn’t they feel like they picked the perfect place to raise their family?
In a dusty corner of their old Victorian home though lies a secret that threatens to change their lives forever. A door has seemingly been sealed with thirty-nine carriage bolts. Thirty-nine is a very significant number to their family and the irony of that is not lost on Chip. When he decides to takes his aggression and anguish out on the door and rid it of the carriage bolts, he unlocks a nightmare for their family that they never expected.
The build on this book is slow and the descriptions are labor-intensive. The story did not grab me right away, but when I hit about halfway in this one, I really wanted to solve the mysteries in the town and discover just what these helpful neighbors were up to. Regardless of the slow build, it did have a great story that just might give you a nightmare or two.
0I would give this book 2.5 stars. Good writing, good suspense, terrible ending, and the depth of the characters was limited.
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