Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for my review. Here is that review"

Ruth Ware is great at creating suspense. It builds and builds, but then it just ends. I wish she would figure out a better way to divulge the "bad guys" and end the books. They are just so abrupt!!

This one begins with Hal, whose mother has recently been killed in a hit-and-run accident right outside their door. In order to survive, Hal has to give up her dreams of college and take over her mother's booth on Brighton Beach reading tarot cards and telling fortunes. She is in debt to a loan shark, who is threatening to do her some serious bodily harm. And then a letter arrives from an attorney, telling her she is an heir to a fortune from a grandmother she never knew existed.

The book follows her visit to the family's country home and unburys some deep family secrets along the way.

It is an OK read, but it did not really grab my attention and took me a long time to finish.

I ADORED this book! This is my first book by Ruth Ware, and I am excited to read more. I loved the young but wizened main character, and the familial mystery and intrigue. I certainly didn't guess the ending. Give me an old house with family secrets and I am IN!

Characters that readers will care about; a conspiracy that lasted for a whole generation; and a writing style that made the book difficult to stop reading.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an eARC of this book.

Darkly intriguing, gothic creepiness that almost became scary, interesting well-developed characters one of which is a tarot reader, twisty plot that didn't become repetitive and an ending that did not make me crazy. All of these thing made for 4 stars from 3.5. A good entertaining summer read.

Ruth Ware at her best - all her another books are great but this one was FANTASTIC holding the reader in suspense until the very end.

This book was both odd and interesting. The oddity of this book was the time period. It felt as though it was a story from long long ago, but it was not. It was a little slow and hard to follow at times but the story held my interest--I wanted to see if my prediction was correct.

I was provided a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest and fair review.

I had heard a lot of good things about this author recently, but I haven't had a chance to read any of her books up until now. I was excited to get the opportunity to read this book. The plot line of this book I thought was great, there were so many twists and turns that by the end I couldn't wait to see what was truth and what was lies. I thought the author did a great job of gently guiding you down a particular path and making you believe things while at the same time presenting facts that would help lead us to the real answer in the end. The answer was right under our noses all along! And the ending really just threw me for such a loop - I didn't see it coming and it was such a great twist ending. There were a couple small slow parts but other than that I couldn't put the book down. I also really liked the incorporation of the tarot cards and their meanings. I thought that was such an interesting addition to the story line and also made the whole plot seem a bit more mystical and mysterious. This book was full of danger and heart-pounding tension, and I can't wait to read more by this author in the future. I would definitely recommend this one!

A case of mistaken identity turns the tide for a struggling young woman when she receives a surprising inheritance in THE DEATH OF MRS. WESTAWAY. In Ware’s signature style, the narrative unwinds gradually, ratcheting a sense of unease and tension.

We meet Harriet “Hal” Westaway, who reads tarot cards at Brighton Pier and struggles under the weight of overdue bills. Worse yet, a loan shark is circling, ready to collect an old debt, or else. But her luck seems to be turning when she receives a letter from a solicitor informing her of a sizeable bequest. Quickly she realizes they meant to send it to someone else, but feeling trapped and out of options, Hal knows her skills at reading people could help her find a way out, a little extra money in her pocket to settle her debts.

With hardly any money left, she sets off to claim the inheritance and meet the family of the now deceased Mrs. Westaway. What she discovers is a derelict house, a surly housekeeper, an estranged family and more secrets than she can process—secrets that suddenly have her questioning everything.

The story has a suspenseful, gothic vibe to it and tells us of a family and the secrets they keep. While there are no huge, action-packed thrills (that’s not her type of book), Ruth Ware does an exceptional job of creating a sinister, threatening atmosphere that keeps you entrenched, flipping the pages until you finally know how it all ends. She’s so adept at creating suspense, you’re on the edge of your seat, waiting for the situation to explode off the page. There were even notes of horror woven throughout.

Hal, our heroine, was a great character and anchor in the story. She had real depth and relatability. You’ll really feel her sense of desperation and struggle throughout, and on many levels. Overall, the book was just so well done, it was very clever and engaging… my favorite of Ware’s to date.

THE DEATH OF MRS. WESTAWAY by Ruth Ware was just released. Although this is the first suspenseful mystery by Ware that I have read, I will definitely be going back and looking for The Woman in Cabin 10 and others by her. THE DEATH OF MRS. WESTAWAY is an atmospheric novel set primarily at a family estate named Trepassen House in Cornwall - picture the moors, the sea, and a frigid, gothic mansion complete with angry magpies to add to the sinister feel.

That’s what 21 year old Hal (short for Harriet) Westaway sees as she responds to a solicitor's summons to attend the funeral and reading of the will for her supposed grandmother, Mrs. Westaway. Complications ensue because Hal is arriving under false pretense with no knowledge of the family, having lost her own mother to a car accident several years earlier and never knowing her father. Gradually, she begins to realize that there is a tie between her mother and the "uncles" she meets, but the sense of danger is almost overwhelming at times with a locked attic room, unappetizing food from a scary housekeeper, and chance of being stranded without transport.

Mystery fans, even if you think you have figured it out, there are plenty of surprise twists; I am definitely recommending THE DEATH OF MRS. WESTAWAY. This title was also a LibraryReads selection for May and received a starred review from Booklist and Kirkus. Read, shiver, and enjoy!

LibraryReads list: http://libraryreads.org/may-2018-libraryreads/

Everything Ruth Ware does is SO good! If you like a good mystery that you'll want to consume in one sitting, she is definitely the author for you. I loved the old english manor and tarot elements of this story.

Ruth Ware has rapidly become one of those authors that are an instant buy for me. I loved In a Dark, Dark Wood and really enjoyed The Woman in Cabin 10 as well. When I saw she had written a new one, I knew that I had to nab it up ASAP.

Hal, a young woman who lives alone, receives a letter notifying her that she was named as a recipient for an inheritance. Her grandmother, Mrs. Westaway, has passed away and she needs to travel to that town in order to claim the offering in the will. The only problem? She doesn't have a grandmother by that name. It's clear that they have accidentally confused her with someone else.

Hal decides to deceive the family in order to claim the inheritance. She knows that she is breaking the law and playing with the emotions of a grieving family, but what she doesn't know is to what extent she will regret playing that role.

This book took me quite by surprise. Judging by the blurb, I expected this to be a thrilling and shocking ride. I expected to hate the heroine and despise every decision she makes. Instead what I got was a slow-burning mystery ladled with heartache and secrecy. I didn't expect to feel so much sadness and hopelessness. Ruth wrote Hal's character so intricately and so realistically that I felt my heart breaking for her time and time again.

There were plenty of surprises all throughout the novel. Although there were a few parts that I was able to foresee, it still kept me guessing until the very end.

Special thanks to Gallery/Scout Press and Ruth Ware for approving my request to read this book through Netgalley!

The Death of Mrs. Westaway
Ruth Ware
May 29, 2018

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware is full of spellbinding menace and told in the author’s signature suspenseful style—an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.

An allusion to an English folk-rhyme; a plot that’s tangentially anchored to the meaning of Tarot cards; plus a downtrodden and vulnerable heroine: these elements comprise the plot of The Death of Mrs. Westaway. The prologue—dated 29th November, 1994—is a meditation of sorts on magpies. It’s not clear who the author is.

The magpies are back. It’s strange to think how much I used to hate them, when I first came to the house.

It has a ring of the famous opening line of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Like du Maurier, Ware is floating questions about where and why. The magpies described in the prologue are omnipresent and upsetting. The writer references “One for Sorrow,” a “traditional children’s nursery rhyme about magpies.” N.B. “One for Sorrow” is the epigraph for The Death of Mrs. Westaway.

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

Never to be told

Did the person writing in 1994 have bad luck? Because the folklore tradition is that “the number of magpies one sees determines if one will have bad luck.” The dark, eerie prologue ends on a hopeful note: “I’ll change that rhyme. One for joy. One for love. One for the future.”

Ruth Ware then switches to a classic mystery opening—a young woman, living in unfortunate circumstances and teetering on the verge of homelessness and worse, receives a letter that promises to vastly improve her life. She is a person of interest: a lawyer invites her to come to Penzance for a reading of a will. Hal (Harriet) Westaway is an orphan, reading tarot cards in the persona of Madame Margarida at a down-at-the-heels kiosk on the Brighton Pier. It’s November, the crowds are dwindling, and the nights are cold and dark. Worse still, she owes money to a loan shark who threatens her livelihood and personal safety.

Hal gives sensitive readings, constantly searching for the right words with which to educate, console, or relieve the worries of her clients—like when she talks to a distraught mother, grievously worried about her drug-addict son. The last card in the woman’s simple three-card spread is the Priestess, symbolizing intuition. Hal’s words are soothing and open-ended. It’s almost as if Hal is speaking to herself.

“Ultimately,” Hal said softly, “you have to decide for yourself what the cards are telling you, but my feeling is that the Priestess is telling you to listen to your intuition. You know the answer already. It’s there in your heart.”

The woman drew back from Hal, and then she nodded, very slowly, and bit her white, chapped lips.

Then she stood, threw down a crumple of banknotes on the table, and turned on her heel.

Hal is horrified at the amount of money the woman gives her—she tears after her to return it. When she can’t catch up, she stuffs every crumpled banknote into a charity slot on the pier. It must be karma: the charity of the month is THE LIGHTHOUSE PROJECT—DRUG REHABILITATION IN BRIGHTON AND HOVE. Hal’s need for karma is paramount because when she returns to her kiosk to pick up her forgotten coat, her loan shark is waiting. He tosses her belongings, tells her he’ll bust up her face, and leaves with a sinister, “sibilant, whistling ssss” snarling that she has a week to come up with the money.

In the years since her mother was killed in a car accident, Hal had become “someone hardened, someone who had to become hardened in order to survive.” Her need for survival has her looking up the Trainline website, “December 1. 7 a.m. Brighton to Penzance, return.” It’s a no-brainer. Hal leaves for Penzance as an imposter, riding a train of nerves and exhilaration. But, of course, there is more to the lawyer’s letter than she realizes.

Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs. Westaway is “an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.” Ruth Ware, like Dame Christie, is British. She was born in 1977, the year after Christie’s death. Writer Karen Woodward, in an extended piece on how to write like Christie, noted her propensity to have a “late start” to the initial murder.

Many of the murder mysteries I read (and watch) have a relatively short interval between the start of the story and the murder. Not so for Agatha Christie’s books. She often had an extended interval between the first character walking on stage and someone getting knocked off.

Perhaps this needs a spoiler alert, but that’s true of The Death of Mrs. Westaway too. But the true mystery is who Hal is. What is her connection to a group of seeming strangers that she meets for the first time at a funeral? Hal’s life and circumstances—both before and after she receives a letter from a lawyer promising an inheritance—are bleak, mysterious, and sad, only occasionally shot through with fleeting joy. It is an unputdownable book—readers will find themselves imagining Hal’s future life, unable to fully part from her, well after the story is finished.

Short Take: Last night I dreamt of Manderley… ahem… Trepassen again……

(*Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review*)

I have always had a weird fixation on houses, especially old ones. I read The Witching Hour by Anne Rice obsessively, not just because of the creepy stuff or hot witch-on-witch action, but for the loving descriptions of the old Mayfair house being restored. There’s just something so delicious about an ancestral home, the one that’s been in the family for decades if not centuries, and the way they tend to become a starring character in some of my favorite stories.

In The Death of Mrs. Westaway, the house is known as Trepassen, and the unlikely heroine of the story is Harriet, or Hal for short. Hal works as a tarot card reader in a somewhat run down beach town, a trade she learned from her mother, who was killed by a drunk driver shortly before the start of the book. When we meet Hal, she’s flat broke, nearly homeless, and about to have her face kicked in by some very serious loan sharks.

So when she opens a letter addressed to her, stating that her grandmother has died, and Hal is the sole heir of a massive estate, it seems like things might finally be breaking her way. Ok, the grandmother is someone she’s never heard of, and the person named as her mother in the letter is another stranger, and the letter was probably never meant for her in the first place, but if anyone could pretend to be the missing heir, it would have to be an experienced fortune teller.

And so, Hal travels to Trepassen, where she has to pretend to be a long-lost relative of people she’s never met. In order to play the part Hal tries to quietly snoop and learn as much as she can about them, but when her digging starts turning up skeletons that someone would rather keep buried, things take a Turn For The Worse.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but I couldn’t help but feel like Ruth Ware had read Rebecca a whole bunch of times and used it as a template.

Chick with dude’s (nick)name? Check.
Ancestral home with dark secrets being investigated by our heroine? Check.
Creepy housekeeper screwing with our heroine at every turn? Check.
[spoiler] hidden in a [spoiler]? Check.

That last is a MAJOR plot point that I won’t describe, because it would be a huge spoiler and everyone would hate me forever after, but trust me - it was lifted directly out of Rebecca.

Of course, there are still plenty of differences, and overall, Mrs. Westaway is a lot of fun (especially the tarot stuff), but to me, there were just too many similarities, and it was distracting.

The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and an Ace of Swords, just because it looks cool).

“How could one family, one person, have so much?”

Hal’s mother dies, leaving her nothing but a cheap rented apartment, a deck of tarot cards, and endless sorrow. She is perplexed but slightly hopeful then, when she receives a note from an attorney indicating she has inherited money; it’s got to be a mistake, but she sure can use it. Why not see where it leads?

My thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the DRC, which I received free and early in exchange for this honest review.

Ware writes in a classic style that’s been compared to Agatha Christie. The traditional elements are there: a menacing old house with a creepy housekeeper; a fortune, complete with competing would-be heirs; an ambiguous old photograph; sinister strangers; a nasty winter storm that prevents escape. In less capable hands it might feel generic, but Ware provides some clever twists that update the old-school model, making for an absorbing read.

My practical side inserts itself, and I find myself wondering—if she feels intimidated by the family, can’t she find an attorney to handle this mess for her at a distance, given what’s waiting at the back end of the transaction? And when she returns to the spooky old house with nothing resolved yet, her stomach in her boots, quivering, I want to say—in all that great manse, surely she can find a different bedroom, one without bars on the windows and locks on the outside of the door. Why be bullied by an 80-year-old housekeeper? Find a different room and claim it, for heaven’s sake. Clean it and put the sheets on yourself if it comes down to it.

But if Hal followed my advice, the story would be no fun at all, so it’s just as well she cannot hear me.

Ruth Ware writes like nobody else, and those that have read her work before know how addictive it is. The more pages I turned, the more I wanted to turn. Mystery lovers and Ware’s fans will want this book right away; turn on all the lights and lock the doors and windows before you dive in. Trust me!

This book is for sale now.

This expertly crafted whodunnit does everything right. With a clever plot and numerous twists and turns, this book had me spellbound from the start, intrigued with attempts to untangle this mystery. I loved the well drawn characters as well as the atmospheric setting.

It reminded me of a 21st century version of an Agatha Christie mystery. In a crumbling, creepy English manor house, the protagonist, Hal, uses her phone as a flashlight to climb the rickety staircase to the even more creepy attic. She has tattoos and piercings and dresses in black, but is surrounded by a cast of characters that would make Christie proud. The omnipresent, elderly housekeeper who, for some reason, seems to hate Hal, sneaks up behind her and whispers warnings in her ear as she passes by.

The pacing was so well done, I had a hard time putting it down. It would make an excellent vacation read, on a sunny beach perhaps? I’m glad to have discovered Ruth Ware, and am looking forward to reading more of her work. I highly recommend this book for a fun, light-hearted read.

Note: I received an advance copy of the ebook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

5 stars! Highly recommended gothic mystery. This was a much anticipated read and I devoured it. I’ve read other books by the author and this is my favorite so far. Baically, an old lady dies. Her children are set to inherit an old house and lots of property. But it gets messy when a supposed granddaughter is located that no one knows existed. And she is invited to come to the reading of the will and share in the inheritance. Can she fool everyone into thinking she is a rightful heir? If she can possibly all her troubles are over.

It’s a page turner. I’ll say no more. It will very likely be one of my favorites from 2018. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a great read. Recommended to readers who enjoy some suspense', odd characters, wistfulness, charm, who dunnits, and old houses with old secrets. Grab a copy today!

Hal is a poor young woman with no family (her mother was killed a year or two ago in a hit and run) who scrapes together a living by reading tarot cards on the pier. One night she comes home to a letter from a lawyer that tells her that her grandmother died, and Hal is set to inherit. Only...Hal's grandmother died years before she was even born. As she also owes money to a ruthless loan shark, Hal decides to attend the funeral and see if she can fool the family into believing that she is truly a long lost relative. As Hal meets her "family" at the old, broken-down family home, she quickly learns that her lies may not be that far from the truth after all...

I had such a hard time putting this book down. On multiple occasions as I was reading, I thought I had figured out the "twist" - only to be surprised after all. The best part about this book is the atmosphere that Ware creates. I read it over a few rainy days on Memorial Day weekend and it put me in the perfect mood for this gothic thriller.

Ruth Ware did it again with this twisting, dark tale of Hal's journey to find out her heritage. Hal, a young, destitute girl, receive a letter stating that her grandmother has passed, and she is to attend the reading of her will. Hal believes that their must be some mistake as her grandparents had long since died, but she is so financially desperate that Hal decides to try to hoodwink the family so she can pay off her debts and be able to comfortably live. She had no idea that showing up to that will reading would put her life and everything she knew about herself into question.

Ruth Ware never ceases to amaze me! The Death of Mrs Westaway might just be my favorite Ruth Ware book. I love how do through the book you think you know what’s going to happen or who done what and then it’s like no I don’t and then back to yes again. Harriet aka Hal is one tough girl and I love how the women in Wares book don’t give up and are determined to see things to the end. The Death of Mrs Westaway is highly suspenseful and you won’t be able to stop until you get to the end. I highly recommend this book and for sure will be putting it on the to be read list for my book club. Now to wait until I can get my next book fix from Ruth Ware.

I have read two other Ruth Ware books so I was excited when I got an ARC of her newest book, out today! And, even better, it is my favorite book of hers that I have read yet! I clicked with the story and was immersed right away. As I read, I was very interested to see how it was all going to pan out. I had my guesses which were partially correct, although there were a lot of fine details that were added to the story.

This is the story of Hal, a young girl who is alone after the death of her mother. Because she really doesn't have any other option, she takes over her mother's tarot reading booth and is just trying to make it day by day. Until she gets a letter saying she has some kind of an inheritance from a lady she has never heard of. She feels that it must be a mistake, but she is desperate and has no other options, so she goes to find out about her possible inheritance.