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Pages: 136
Goes Well With: a bowl of warm, hearty soup and hot tea
It seems as though the majority of the Lunch Break E-books that we cover are romances. From simple and sweet to hot and steamy, boy-meets-girl stories seem best suited for quick, casual lunchtime reads. But with her slightly-longer-than-a-lunch-break novel, Shadows from the Past, author Rebecca Grace is given a little extra breathing room, allowing her to add mystery and suspense to the usual short romance.
Stacey Moreno arrives at the dark, foreboding Redfern Manor looking for answers. Not long ago, Stacey’s best friend, Helen, was hired to assist former journalist Mack Warren in researching a book on Redfern Manor resident turned Hollywood murder case Lily Feeney. For a while, Helen loved her new job, but she soon started expressing her concerns. Then, after making a frantic, fearful call to her best friend, Helen was found dead. Her death was quickly ruled a suicide, but Stacey knows better. She knows that Helen would never kill herself.
Though she’s nowhere near as daring as Helen was, Stacey feels that she owes it to her friend to find out what really happened—so she takes a job as Mack’s new assistant and starts digging for clues. But, tucked away in the secluded mansion, she quickly begins to realize that anyone could be a suspect in her friend’s death.
From the very first page of Shadows from the Past, Grace sets a dark and mysterious tone. A creepy mansion on a remote island may be a pretty typical mystery cliché—and Grace takes it one step further by having Stacey arrive at the Manor on a cold and rainy day—but it works. The setting is sure to give you chills—and there’s just something about the mansion and its mysterious inhabitants that will pique your interest and keep you reading.
The characters, meanwhile, are given more development than usual, thanks to the story’s longer length—but that’s not always a good thing. On one hand, Mack is definitely an intriguing character—a kind of dark, tragic hero (or perhaps a dark, tragic villain), who’s locked himself in the mansion and buried himself in Lily Feeney’s story as he continues to grieve for the wife and child whom he lost in a place crash.
Stacey’s personality traits, on the other hand, sometimes make her seem silly and immature. Not only is she a timid woman in her 20s who can’t tell her left from her right, but she also lives vicariously through a cartoon character named Kendra (who was inspired by strong, adventurous Helen). Throughout the story, she often asks herself, What would Kendra do? making her seem more like a child with an imaginary friend than a grown woman.
Meanwhile, Stacey’s behavior often feels wildly out of character. Considering how timid she’s supposed to be, it’s unlikely that she’d go so far as to travel to a remote island, move into a creepy mansion, and surround herself with suspicious characters. Then, though she’s not sure that she can trust Mack, she keeps feeding him information that Helen wanted kept hidden. And even after she begins to realize the danger she’s in, she still refuses to leave. Anyone who’s truly timid would have avoided the situation and made a call to the police instead.
Despite the questionable personality traits of the main character, though, the eerie tone and additional development of Shadows from the Past definitely offer a welcome change from the same old lunch break romance. So, if you’re looking for a little more than the usual chick lit (and if you’re willing to commit to reading through a couple of lunch breaks instead of just one), the mystery of Redfern Manor is still worth investigating.
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