THE LAKE HOUSE by Kate Morton

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

A lengthy work of historical suspense with parallel plots involving a child disappearance in 1933 at the Edevane family estate in Cornwall, and a 2003 case in London when a mother’s disappearance seemingly leads to her child’s abandonment. Sadie Sparrow is a detective who overstepped her bounds in the London case and lays low in Cornwall, where she digs into the unsolved 1933 case. Sadie catches up with Alice Edevane, a famous crime novelist, who was sixteen at the time of her brother’s disappearance, and the book rapidly moves back and forth from 2003 to 1933 and 1911 as clues fly fast and furious. Alice’s father Anthony’s severe PTSD from traumas at the Great War is central to the 1933 disappearance. Cornwall estate life is portrayed in inviting and descriptive prose that progresses to a touching melancholy as Anthony’s war service and PTSD take center stage. I very much enjoyed the ‘look back in time’ structure to solving the 1993 case, although I found the narrative often came on excessively thick upon point of view and scene transitions.