I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

Hester Reeves leaves her husband, Jos, and younger sister, Willa, for a short while to nurse a sick man named Gervaise Cherville, who owns a gloomy estate called Tall Trees. Hester's only friend there is Jenny, a kindly maid who is happy to share meals and chat. The reason Hester took this job is her fear that her sister will be ruined by Gervaise's son, a reprobate named Rowland, who manages his father's factory. Hester plans to use her earnings to relocate her family. Willa fiercely resents Hester's bossiness, and she lashes out repeatedly when Hester tries to reason with her.

"House of Shades," by Lianne Dillsworth, takes place in England in 1833. Hester, who is Black and an expert in using herbs to help her patients, soon learns that Cherville's problems are mental as well as physical. He often wakes up in terror after hearing voices crying in the night. The vicar, Mr. Bright, who recommended Hester for her new position, has told Gervaise that he must atone for his family's past practice of keeping slaves on their plantation in Honduras. However, the old man has a different agenda—to find the women he brought to England decades earlier as slaves and pay them reparations so that he will be able to sleep peacefully.

The author's implausible and talky plot is riddled with lapses in logic. In addition, Hester has such poor judgment that it is difficult to cheer for her. She is overbearing in her attitude towards Willa, makes boneheaded decisions that come back to haunt her, and learns too late that meddling in other people's business can be unwise if not downright catastrophic. In "House of Shades," the characters are, for the most part, one-dimensional. The novel's saving grace is Dillsworth's exploration of how poverty and racism can destroy people's lives.

Beggars can’t be choosers. Neither can women doctors in 1833, apparently. Protagonist Hester Reeves agrees to treat and care for a dying old man so that she can make enough money for her small family to resettle in a nicer part of London. At least, Hester thinks that’s the only task she’s expected to take up for Gervaise Cherville. Within pages of the opening of Lianne Dillsworth’s many-layered House of Shades, Hester is asked to take up a more challenging task than caring for a man with terminal syphilis.

Hester’s skin starts to crawling the minute she sets foot in Tall Trees, the London townhouse of the Cherville family. The housekeeper is an unpleasant woman in the mold of Mrs. Danvers. Gervaise Cherville is an entitled, mercurial invalid. The less said about Rowland Cherville, Gervaise’s heir, the better. But for £10 for a few week’s work, Hester is willing to put up with a lot. She’s no stranger to treating sexually transmitted infections; she previously treated sex workers in her corner of London.

Hester is considerably less experienced with the job Gervaise wants to task her with: find two women who the Chervilles enslaved before the women escaped nearly thirty years prior. Mr. Bright (who recommended Hester for the job), an abolitionist and cleric of some sort, has been working on Gervaise for years to make some kind of atonement for enslaving people on the family’s Caribbean estate. The United Kingdom passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which freed all enslaved people throughout the British Empire; Bright hopes that Gervaise will make restitution for years of forced labor. Gervaise, however, decides that his atonement will take the form of finding the two women and giving them both large sums of money. Hester, being a Black woman herself, is perfect (so Gervaise decides) to help him find the women without them bolting at the mere sight of him.

House of Shades runs at a faster clip than I expected, given how hard I expected it to be for Hester to track down two women who disappeared decades earlier and who understandably don’t want to be found. There are some moments of luck and revelation that will strain credulity. In spite of the Dickens level coincidences, however, I found myself completely hooked by this story. First, Hester is my kind of protagonist. She’s got a strong sense of ethics, thought she’s pragmatic enough to bend the rules in order to accomplish a greater good. Second, I find it hard to resist a sensationalist plot that includes a spooky house, a malevolent housekeeper, and several closets full of metaphorical skeletons.

Set in victorian London, this dark drama follows a woman doctor through her journey to uncover the past. This mysterious read will keep you guessing and in love with the gothic themes. I could not put this down!

With due respect to the “Bridgerton” miniseries, most people of African descent in Regency and Victorian Britain did not live among the upper classes. Hester Reeves, the heroine of Lianne Dillsworth’s second novel, “House of Shades,” is far more typical in her background. A “doctoress” (healer, because in 1833 a woman could not earn a medical degree), Hester has spent most of her career working with streetwalkers among the stews of London, but at the beginning of the novel, a recommendation from her pastor has landed her what looks like a great job: care for an elderly industrialist at his London mansion for four weeks, and she will earn ten pounds, which at that time is enough to support herself, her husband, their as yet unborn baby, and her younger sister in relative comfort outside the city.

The salary has a special importance for Hester, who vowed to her dying mother that she would protect the younger sister, sixteen-year-old Willa, from harm. But Willa, as resistant to adult restrictions as most teenagers, has become involved with her boss at the factory where she works, so removing her from London and its temptations is an essential part of protecting her, at least in Hester’s eyes.

From the beginning, the job is not quite as advertised. The mansion, Tall Trees, looms above Hester—cold, oppressive, daunting. The staff consists of a friendly young maid and a stern housekeeper bent on getting Hester out of the house as soon as possible, even if it means lying about her to the homeowner, Gervais Cherville, and his son—Willa’s would-be seducer. Gervais himself welcomes Hester’s remedies, but she soon recognizes that he suffers from syphilis. That heightens her concern for Willa, consorting with a man who may have inherited the disease from his father. Then Hester learns what else Gervais Cherville wants from her, and before long, she’s submerged in the tortured heritage of slavery in the United Kingdom, from the depths of poverty to, yes, those upper classes of “Bridgerton” fame.

This is a Gothic novel in every sense, from its opening paragraph to its classic conclusion, but its unflinching if never preachy focus on nineteenth-century race relations and its professional, pregnant, happily married heroine give it an interesting twist. Hester is at times too principled for her own good, but her devotion to her family and her patients make us pull for her all the way.

I plan to interview this author on my blog (link below) in mid-July, when the book comes out.

House of Shades follows Hester as she begins a four week job as nurse to an dying man. She feels something dark in the house as soon as she enters, and she starts uncovering the secrets of the family. Soon, her employer asks her to help him make atonement for some decisions in his past, which bring up more secrets, until Hester is in too deeply.
I don't think this is a bad book, it is historical fiction, depicting London as it begins to disallow any kind of slave labor. Hester is a Black woman, and so we are following her journey to discover more about her background. However, based on the description, I was expecting more of a Gothic tale where the house was a character, instead this was more of a family drama. It described as dark and immersive, neither of which came across to me in this read. For readers of historical fiction and stories and interfamilial relationships, this would be one to pick up.

Haunting? Cursed House? What or who is causing the perpetual tragedies befalling this family of former slave owners? Who will protect them, and do they even deserve it? I enjoyed this novel even as I was repulsed by the community's treatment of persons of color. Interesting twists in this mystery.

I wanted more from this book. It reminded me of Riley sager in some contexts. I thought it was easy to read and straightforward but I didn’t feel like the characters had an depth