This is my third Jaime Jo Wright in a year and my sixth in three. I know what to expect from her at this point and this follows very much in the vein of the others. It feels like a lesser book within that company, perhaps because it's so insular. Both of its primary timelines feature tiny casts and very little scope for things to not go in the direction they've often been literally required to go. There isn't a lot of room for Wright to do much other than set everything in motion and then wait for us to catch up before springing a trap. She does share the occasional clue but I doubt this is one that many readers are going to figure out before the big secret is revealed.

As always, there are two timeframes in play, though this time there are a couple more that have meaning as well. The primary ones are 1890 and now, both of which unfold at the Traeger Hall of the title, which is outside the Wisconsin town of Newton Creek. I presume some characters spend time in Newton Creek itself, but it doesn't seem that way. It feels like all the characters we meet float around outside of it with an invisible string around their waists to connect them inexorably to Traeger Hall and whatever they want to do, they end up back there anyway.

We spend 1890 with Waverly Pembrooke, who's stuck in a rather peculiar position. She's an orphan who was taken in by her Aunt Cornelia, who then married Leopold Traeger, rich and powerful but far less interested in having a young lady around the place. Leopold was a strange man, who was so convinced that he would be murdered that he had a belltower installed on the side of the hall, with instructions that it should be rung at the point he would be attacked so that the townsfolk in Newton Creek could rush to his assistance. They did but it was too late for him and his wife, which leaves Waverly alone in Traeger Hall.

Now, you might think that she'll just inherit the place and life will be great, but Leopold has other ideas in a very strange but carefully worded will. She must sit with the bodies for seven days so as to be sure of death. That's a weirdly long time, especially for 1890 when we didn't have the quality of refrigeration we have today. Then she'll have two days to leave, before the hall will be bricked up for the next hundred years, everything inside remaining there throughout. Waverly will be on her own without anything but what she brought with her when she moved in.

Fast forward to the present day and Traeger Hall is still sealed. Its latest owner is Jennie Phillips, who inherits after her mother dies of cancer. She's spent most of her time in France studying art but her dad had a whole string of properties around the globe, Traeger Hall being just one. She's now in Newton Creek to take ownership, but she's hit by two surprises. One is that her dad left an odd codicil of his own. She can do anything she likes with the property—she can reopen it, as that century required by Traeger has been exceeded; she can ignore it completely; or she can bulldoze it—but she can't sell it. She can't do that until he's been dead for fifty years.

This is a fantastic way to kick off a novel, because we have no idea whatsoever why Traeger wrote his will the way he did and we have no idea why Phillips added the codicil that he did. Wright isn't done though. The other surprise Jennie finds is a body that's presumably been submerged in the creek for the past eight years. It's the corpse of Allison Harris, a local girl who was obsessed with Traeger Hall and tried to find a way inside, believing there must be a secret passage somewhere just waiting for her to uncover it.

There are a huge amount of mysteries in play here. Who murdered Leopold and Cornelia Traeger in 1890? Why did Leopold expect it? What was his business doing to warrant something so serious? Why did he want Traeger Hall sealed for a hundred years? What happened to Waverly? Now minus eight years, who kidnapped and murdered Allison? Did that have anything to do with Traeger Hall and, if it did, who cares that much about keeping the place sealed? And, all the way to the present, why did Jennie's dad buy Traeger Hall then require in his will that it not be sold? There are other questions that come up too as the book builds that I won't mention here, other than to underline that they all arrive before any of the answers.

We get answers to most of those questions, though I never worked out Jennie's dad's motivation to do anything, especially buying what's effectively a gigantic time capsule then never opening it. However, the only answer we get before the very end of the book is a partial one. Whatever we're going to see in Traeger Hall in 1890 after the deaths of her aunt and uncle, Jenny makes it out of there alive because Wright gives us a few excerpts from an interview with her shortly before her death in 1950. That's why there are more than two timelines here, even though they're the focus. We care about Waverly in 1950 and we also care about Allison eight years before the present day.

There are some clues, albeit not a lot of them. There are connections to abuse in both of the main timelines and there are lots of mentions of art. Jennie's history is with art and there are rumours that there's a valuable art collection locked up in Traeger Hall. When we do find our way inside, as we were always going to do at some point, we find that a lot of it was painted by an artist Jennie's never heard of called Vallée, which presumably counters the rumours. The artists who are worth money are the ones that even we have heard of, not the ones that art experts haven't.

You'll likely have noticed that I've mentioned very few characters thus far. I believe I've only told you about seven and five of them were either already dead before they were introduced or were quickly killed. Only Waverly and Jennie start out alive and stay that way throughout. Of course, a bunch of other characters show up too, but it's not as large a bunch as you might expect. For one thing, Wright traditionally sets up romantic angles for her leads and this book is no exception, but it's completely obvious who they are because there really aren't a lot of others.

We know Waverly's going to get together with Titus, the undertaker, eventually and Jennie has a similar destiny with Zane, who was Allison's husband. There are no surprises there. What I didn't expect was that Zane has a son, Milo, who's autistic and, while he doesn't play a huge part in this book, it includes a few key scenes. After Jennie and Zane finally open a way into Traeger Hall and the former has a strange experience, it's quietly breathing with Milo that helps her out of it. He's also the one who finds Allison's body, which is extra impactful because she was his mother. I liked Milo a lot.

I liked the book too, but it feels like Wright stripped down her options with it just as much as she'd placed so many restrictions on Waverly and Jennie both. That may be why she felt the need to put a clichéd monologuing villain into play towards the end to answer some of those questions. I liked the few characters we had and I liked the weirdness of it all even more: the bell, the wills, the odd week of lying in state. The romances aren't played up and the religious angle is hardly present, a brief moment of God being about it. This is very much a suspense novel rather than a mystery or a romance or a Christian novel. There are mysteries to solve but we don't solve them.

There are also negatives. That monologuing villain is cheap, even if I can understand why Wright felt shoehorned into that. There are a few strands of plot that I don't believe are wrapped up. It's not just Jennie's dad's part, which I don't understand at all, but other details. One major one was the fact that, unusually for Wright, there are mysteries wrapped up in 1890 that don't seem to be known later, even though we have papers from Waverly in 1950. I wanted to know what happened to a number of supporting characters involved with those mysteries and Wright doesn't seem to be interested in telling us. She needs to keep it a mystery for Jennie.

I should underline that, even with more concerns than I'm used to having with a Jaime Jo Wright novel, I enjoyed this. She's a master at weaving two stories in different times into one and every subsequent book I read tells me that really ought to pick up the eight such books she published in the years before I found out she existed. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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