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1950s,2000s: The promise of a lazy summer in a gothic house reveals secrets within its walls…
The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde
What you need to know before your trail
Applecote Manor – The large gothic house captivates Jessie with it promise of hazy summers in the Cotswolds. However, the house has an unsettling history, and there is a strange sense of foreboding throughout the estate and in the walls of the house
Back in the fifties, it was a hive of activity, when four sisters enjoyed the heatwave of 1959. But there is a clod of sadness even then as only five years previous, their aunt and uncle lost their daughter, Audrey. They desperately now want to find their cousin and discover what happened back then.
But it’s then that the stifling summer takes a shocking, deadly turn. Will one unthinkable choice bind them together, or tear them apart?
Travel Guide
Applecote Manor, The Cotswolds
Evergreens are packed hard against the orangery’s windows, threatening to break the and scatter the wooden window-seat with poisonous berries, like beads.
Jessie is already imagining oranges dangling, blood-warm and heavy in the hand, the glass doors flung back to the euphoria of summer, the peal of girls’ wild laughter.
This orangery and the house are fascinating and like another world. It promises a Mediterranean fruit in the English climate”, “Control through optimism”
The house itself is quite small, not the manor they’d imagined but it’s rustic rather than grand,with no strange edges and wooden beams. It settles into the countryside rather than dominates it. “What could be more innocent than Applecote Manor?”
In the present day, someone notices that Applecote has been on the market for some time and that it’s as if it’s been stopped in another era, like a pocket watch
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
Eve Chase wrote Black Rabbit Hall which built a very idyllic yet gothic mansion deep in the English countryside. Here we have Applecote with secrets within its walls and what went on there all those years ago made me shiver.
I do love a good dual time line novel and this just sang to me. The opening chapter was one of the best and suspenseful I’d read in a while. The time line stories really fitted with the themes and setting but I did prefer the story in the past. The house was at the centre of a deliciously hidden and evocative time – the secret which broke that all apart, and made the house what it is today.
I felt part of the scene – sitting in the hot summer grass, the grand house behind me.There’s some lovely writing in this book “We move away but we live for ever where we were most alive”. A novel to read with a glass of something cold and the promise of a sunny escape with clouds of intrigue and darkness on the horizon
There is lots of scene setting , some intriguing characters, a weaving tale and the result is a captivating read.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde
Author/Guide: Eve Chase Destination: The Cotswolds Departure Time: 2000s, 1950s
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