Shadows in the Moonlight by Santa Montefiore

My spooky reading in October continues with Shadows in the Moonlight by Santa Montefiore, a ghost story that I had been excitedly saving for Halloween (and by the time you read this, Halloween has come and gone!). I’ve never read a book by Montefiore, but she’s a UK writer that sells quite well in the romance genre, so perhaps some may already be familiar with her name. Although not a romance reader myself (I will dabble though), I was hoping this book would lean more to the scary than sentimental side, and it was a surprising mix of thriller, historical fiction, romance and gothic suspense – so lots to enjoy, for many different kinds of readers. And if you like the sounds of that, this is the first in a planned series, and the second is already on its way.

Plot Summary

Pixie Tate is unlucky in love – we meet her as she just discovers her current boyfriend is cheating on her with another woman. As she mopes around at home, tended to by her handsome, rich and gay roommate Ulysses, she’s offered a new job. There’s an old haunted manor called St. Sidwell on the Cornish coast that’s just been inherited by a young family, and they are desperate to make this place their home, but there is clearly something wrong; it’s always freezing cold, and no one can sleep due to the cries of a woman heard throughout the house at night. None of the locals will work there either, with the whole surrounding town knowing it’s cursed history. Among certain circles Pixie is known to have special abilities that allow her to connect with spirits, and she’s asked to come help with clearing out St Sidwell Manor. Once there, Pixie quickly makes contact with the restless ghost, and discovers her name is Cordelia, and she’s distraught by the loss of her youngest son Felix, who apparently disappeared in the middle of the night, more than one hundred years before, in 1895. Pixie has special abilities to time travel and slide into other people’s bodies in the past for short periods of time, so she inhabits the body of Hermione Swift, a governess to Felix before his death to determine what happened to him. But while on this fact-finding mission, she begins to fall in love with Cordelia’s brother-in-law who also lives at St Sidwell Manor, and finds herself distracted by this blooming romance while trying to figure out Felix’s sad fate. St Sidwell is also home to many servants and staff so the possibilities of who hurt Felix are endless, but Pixie is determined to find out what happened that night so she can help put Cordelia’s spirit to rest.

My Thoughts

Despite my initial disappointment that ghosts and general hauntings did not make up the novel’s major tensions, I found myself swept up into Pixie’s experiences of life in St Sidwell Manor as a governess, and the mystery she attempts to unravel while living as Hermione Swift. Montefiore successfully builds the suspense as Pixie counts down to the evening of Felix’s disappearance, listening in to whispered conversations, creeping along hidden passageways, and interacting with the disgruntled employees of the Pengower family all part of her detective work in service to the family of the present day. The romantic storyline was a pleasant element of distraction from the incredibly sad event of Felix’s disappearance slowly getting closer and closer, and although Pixie was in the position to stop it from happening, she knew that changing history so dramatically could have tragic affects for the future – the butterfly effect was often cited as a reason for her refusing to do this, even when it was so tempting. It was a heartbreaking thing to read about, knowing that a young child was in danger and there was nothing to be done about it, but Montefiore handles this sensitively, and it never felt gratuitous or unnecessary.

Even though this was only the first in the series, I felt as though Pixie’s character was well fleshed out almost immediately, and I was surprised at how quickly I warmed to her as a narrator and protagonist. Normally it would take me longer to ‘accept’ these special abilities of hers, but her discomfort with time travel and inhabiting another body put her on the same level as the reader. By removing both the reader and the narrator from our comfortable situations into a foreign time and place together, we share Pixie’s desire to fit in and figure things out, as the goal of our trip back through time is one that everyone wants to see completed: putting a mother’s guilt sorrow to rest.

Time travel is rarely my cup of tea in literature, but I think this book may have changed my mind about that. If I can stretch my imagination to include ghosts and haunted houses, why not a little time travel too?