Five Mile House: A Novel
by Karen Novak

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Book Reviews of Five Mile House: A Novel

Book Review: A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN GHOST STORY AND IMPRESSIVE DEBUT NOVEL
Summary: 4 Stars

The story revolves around a married female detective, Leslie Stone, who lives with her husband, Greg, and her two young daughters, Molly and Emma. One morning, Leslie goes to work on a particularly brutal child homicide. A perpetrator is in custody, and when Leslie goes to interview him, she snaps and metes out a form of vigilante justice that is final and irrevocable. Arrested, charged with murder, and tried, she is found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Confined for months to a mental hospital, she is finally released.

Her husband, a building contractor, having anticipated the notoriety attendant with his wife's release, got a job that enabled them to move to a new place and get a fresh start, or so he thinks. They move from to the small New England town of Wellington, where he has been able to obtain his dream job, the restoration of an unusual house named Five Mile House. The catch here is that Five Mile House has had its own share of notoriety. A century ago, a woman, Eleanor Bly, killed her children, then herself, in that house. Moreover, it is located in a town riddled with witches, adherents to the ancient Wiccan religion.

Leslie, a detective down to her very soul, soon discovers that she is Eleanor Bly's doppelganger, and that the dream job her husband got was not gotten by chance. Moreover, she sense that there is something about the house that is evil. The past soon begins to collide with the present, as Eleanor reaches out to Leslie to try to set the record straight about what really happened at Five Mile House all those years ago. What she reveals, bit by bit, will keep the reader turning the pages. It is only at the end that the author stumbles a bit, as she tries to bring closure to her story. It is still, however, a debut novel to remember.