The Haunting Of Blackwater - Marcia Armandi
Publisher – City Owl Press
Published – Out Now
Price – £16.99 hardback | £5.49 Kindle
I requested this book on NetGalley last year and then hit a reading slump and never got round to downloading it. Then around a week ago I spotted it in my local bookshop and remembered that I'd wanted to read it, so I picked it up. Here's the blurb:
Lina doesn’t believe in ghosts, but they won’t leave her alone.
When her father is killed, Lina and her little brother Mateo are forced to move in with her domineering uncle at Blackwater Manor. Lina soon discovers that her uncle intends for her to marry his nephew, Bray, to gain control of her inheritance. She is also convinced her uncle had something to do with her father’s death.
As the days pass, it becomes increasingly clear that Blackwater is haunted, and the malevolent presence seems determined to harm the siblings. To protect her brother, Lina attempts to communicate with the ghosts, all the while evading the handsome but devious Bray and crossing paths with the mysterious Max, a dashing army lieutenant with secrets of his own.
But as Lina unearths the atrocities of the past, she must now unmask her father’s killer and discover the ghosts’ intentions before she becomes one of them.
I love a good haunted house story, and combining that with a murder mystery sounded like it was going to be right up my street. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and I ended up deciding not to finish reading the book at around 25%.
It's always immediately obvious when a book set in England is written by somebody who isn't from the UK, in a way that's hard to pin down precisely. I'm sure it's exactly the same when English writers set their work in other countries, too, but being English I found it hard to ignore the anachronisms here. They were mostly small things like the language people use, but also larger inaccuracies that speak to the research into the setting being a little lacking. The most jarring, for me, was the moment that Lina speaks about the library she worked at in London, which is named as Chetham's. Chetham's Library is the oldest surviving public library in Britain and is, famously, in Manchester (which happens to be where I'm from, so of course this jumped out at me immediately).
This is ostensibly an adult novel but to me it reads more like YA, and had it been marketed in that way I likely wouldn't have picked it up. I think there's likely an interesting plot hiding in here somewhere, but it's buried beneath a tangled layer of multiple other plots that feel a little too much, especially at the start. There is of course every chance that they all come together into a cohesive whole by the end of the novel, but initially it all felt a little messy and unfocused and nothing was compelling enough to override my irritation at the anachronistic setting and strange word choices in much of the writing.
Ultimately this just wasn't for me.