Black Rabbit Hall: The enchanting mystery from the author of The Glass House

Product Information

Winner of Saint Maur en Poche prize for bestforeign fiction, 2019 (published in France as UnManoir en Cornouailles)

I want to thank the publisher for providing me with a free copy through Edelweiss for an honest review! Beautifully, poetically written and reminiscent of everything from I Capture The Castle to Hansel And Gretel' Daily Mail An enthralling and deeply moving novel about family secrets, loss, and love.”—Margaret Leroy, author of The Soldier’s Wife

A gorgeously written novel describing the love and affection that hold families together and the powerful forces that can tear them apart.”– Huffington Post Compellingly readable and riddled with twists and turns worthy of Daphne du Maurier, Chase’s tale will delight fans of romantic mysteries. Like the setting of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Chase’s novel is lovely, dark and deep..”— Richmond Times-Dispatch

This is the title I was most looking forward to in my “Most anticipated titles of 2016” blog post and I was not disappointed! A wonderful saga of family secrets, tragic loss, and enduring love with a dual storyline, it will appeal to fans of Kate Morton, Rosamund Pilcher, Maeve Binchy and Sarah Waters. For the four Alton children, it's the perfect summer escape where not much ever happens - until one stormy evening their idyllic world is shattered.

Media Reviews

Decades later, Lorna is drawn to a crumbling Cornish manor house she hazily remembers from childhood - feels a bond she does not understand.

Equal parts romance, mystery, and historical fiction. For readers who are interested in complex period drama such as Daisy Goodwin’s The American Heiress, or who enjoy a touch of the gothic such as in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebeccaor Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale.”– Library Journal(starred review) This sentence, with its tone, its setting, its haunting foreshadowing, sets the rest of the book up perfectly.The basic set up here is that you have the Altons: owners of a rambly pile in Cornwall, the traditionally English father fell in love with a warm-hearted American heiress, because don’t they always. Anyway, they had four kids (two twins, Amber and Toby, then Barney, then Kitty) who had a pretty much idyllic childhood with their stupidly-in-love parents and their country house to spend their summers in. But then Nancy dies in a horse-riding accent and everything unravels from there. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

A twisting gothic of family secrets, forbidden lust, and an extraordinary family.”–Miranda Beverly-Whittemore,author of Bittersweet Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read. Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers ... The mystery of what became of the family is told in alternate chapters, while Mrs. Alton shares her memories with Lorna in the present. And while I don’t inherently consider inspiring ANY sort of human feeling as evidence of merit, I think in this case it sort of was. I felt stuff because I discovered I cared. And in another time, place, world I would have been moved and appreciated the bittersweetness of it all and any shifty tears I might have shed.

BookBrowse Review

How gloriously gothic! There are hundreds more beguiling passages like these, but I don’t want to give anything away! You’ll have to read it for yourself.