Jaime Jo Wright is knocking a book out every six months and I'm always up for another one, as they're palate cleansers for me. I know pretty much what I'm getting into because she works to a formula, but she mixes it up enough to keep each book interesting and she keeps throwing in moments or details or reveals that elevate them. This may be the weakest of the five I've read and reviewed thus far but maybe that's because she mixes up it a little more than usual not to tell a story but to make a point. And it's a good point.

We're in Silvertown this time out, which is above the bridge in the Porkies, or for those not too versed in the slang, in the Porcupine Mountains on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It's not a real town but, as it's close to one called Ontonagon, which is real, I'm guessing that it's a thinly veiled take on Silver City a mere thirteen miles west down the shore of Lake Superior. What we need to know is that it's a town that struck silver but also ran dry and quickly faded away into a shadow of its former self. The story hints that the silver is still there and the MacGuffin of the story isn't really a character but the map that she hid to where the silver can be found.

We meet this character in 1874 after she's been attacked. She's still being hunted by person or persons unknown but clearly dangerous, and she wakes up on a notable grave without memory of who she is. Only the locket around her neck tells her that she's Rebecca. She's found there by Edgar, the keeper of the local lighthouse, who takes her back there and keeps her safe. Wright always tells her stories in two timelines but, while this is one in the past, there's another past before it and technically we start there.

That grave belongs to a lady named Annabel, the one who lent her name to the title, and she's as important to this story as anybody else even though she's hardly in it. Her gravestone states that she died in 1852 but her ghost is already hanging around Silvertown and the lighthouse in particular in Rebecca's day and that doesn't change when we skip forward to the parallel story in the present day. Whenever anything unusual happens in Silvertown, the blame tends to find its way to Annabel's ghost quickly if not immediately. Nobody seems to know exactly who she is but she's still arguably the most known character in Silvertown a hundred and seventy years on from her death.

The present day story features Shea Radclyffe, a young writer from Wisconsin who's rented the lighthouse from its current owner, Holt Nelson, mostly to get away from her husband Pete (not because he's done anything bad but because she doesn't believe he's done anything good), but also to look into Annabel's story, potentially for a book. This is what she does. She travels to the sort of places that thrive on ghost stories and writes about "historical tales and legends". She doesn't have much to work on yet but she plans to talk to the townsfolk and spin something out of what she hears.

She's hardly unhappy when she discovers that the previous owner of the lighthouse, Jonathan Marks, died right there on the lighthouse floor in what is often described as a suspicious death. Officially, he committed suicide, but given that he was left handed but supposedly shot himself in the head with his right hand, there's a strong faction that buys into murder. And that wasn't 1852. That was 2010. So now she has two mysterious deaths to investigate and she thinks that a story told in two times might just sell. I have a feeling Wright knows plenty about that.

There are a few things immediately apparent beyond what we expect from Wright's formula.

For one, we're clearly supposed to keep Edgar Allan Poe in mind. Every chapter, whether past or present, begins with a brief quote from his poem 'Annabel Lee', a love story about a young lady who died in a "kingdom by the sea". Given that the lighthouse keeper is named Edgar, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that they're connected. Poe is even namechecked at one point, just to hammer the point home.

For another, the location is important. I don't mean Silvertown but the lighthouse in the title and on the cover. As that title suggests, it's generally known as Annabel's Lighthouse, but it's not really hers because it wasn't even built when she drowned nearby in the lake. Of course, it serves as a powerful metaphor. Lighthouses exist primarily to keep people safe, albeit usually sailors navigating dangerous waters near the coastline. It didn't do that job for Annabel but it seems to have done it literally for Rebecca and it may do it metaphorically for Shea, too. Oddly, the only shipwreck to happen during the novel fails to manifest any survivors isn't depressing; it's almost a baton pass from the lighthouse's physical job, which failed, to a metaphorical one, which we hope will succeed.

For a third, that's because the romantic angle that usually unfolds is very different. Wright is fond of connecting two people together in the core location for a book, in both timelines, and sparking a romance between them. That seems to happen in the present day story here, when Shea, who's wondering if she should end her marriage to Pete, clearly connects with Holt. They seem like a far more natural couple than what we know of Pete, who's boring enough to spend most of his time working on cars. In the past, Rebecca is too busy trying to both stay alive and figure out who she actually is to worry about romance. Oh, and she's pregnant.

I can't talk too much about the fourth but it's the most important because it has to do with the way the book wraps up. With this formula, Wright tells two different stories that happen to be set in the same physical location generations apart but eventually they merge into one and an abiding mystery is solved. That kinda-sorta happens here too, but not really. The mystery in the past is only a mystery to Rebecca and it isn't that deep even to her. The mystery in the present is more traditional and more substantial but, while Shea does solve it, the MacGuffin remains safe and sound because it ceases to be important to her or others, given the core lesson that's learned as the mystery is solved.

In some ways, that makes the lesson more important than the mystery and that's a first for me with Wright's work, even if I've only read the latest five of what is now a list of thirteen novels, all with similar titles and that presumably follow Wright's pet formula. Maybe that's why this novel has a small and incestuous cast of characters. Sure, Silvertown is inherently small, due to its primary reason to exist failing a century and a half ago, so it's fair to expect everybody in it to know everybody else, but Wright takes that a couple of steps further still. It makes for some wonderful reveals in the final hundred pages but not for many possibilities in the present day mystery.

I'd argue that there are more little mysteries, all clearly tied together, than there are suspects to have caused them. Who murdered Jonathan Marks in 2010, given that we don't buy into the suicide theory? Who threw a brick through Shea's windscreen while she's getting information from the talkative Edna Carraway? And who ran Pete over in the lighthouse's driveway? Yes, he shows up to fix Shea's car and you're not paying attention if you think he just hits the road back to Wisconsin. If we don't buy into every weird moment at the lighthouse being the work of the ghost, who's the frequently glimpsed figure in white? Who's leaving bloody handprints on the windows? Who's walking around at night to make the floorboards upstairs creak?

I need to shut up before I start venturing into spoiler territory, but once we figure out what the lesson is going to be, for Rebecca and especially for Shea, it's not too hard to extrapolate it out to everything else happening. I enjoyed this book, but not as much as its four predecessors. I'd suggested 'Specters in the Glass' as the best of them in my review of that book and that's the one before this, so the contrast may seem a little more overt. However, I'd put 'The Vanishing at Castle Moreau' next and that was the first Wright that I encountered, so it's hardly a simple curve of quality moving progressively up or down. It's doing both and this is a dip, even though it's a worthy read with a good message. I always liked Pete anyway. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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