Newport opens in 1921, with attorney Adrian de la Noye en route to Newport from Boston to draft a new will for his long-time client and friend, Bennett Chapman. Chapman is engaged to a much younger woman; his adult children are opposing the new will and questioning his fiancée's motives for marrying their aging father. Jill Morrow (The Open Channel) reinvents the age-old trope of a gold-digging bride and disappointed heirs by adding in an unexpected twist: Chapman has determined that he must marry this woman because the ghost of his first wife has instructed him to do so.
Of course, Chapman's insistence on his late wife's presence is enough to make anyone question his sanity--but in a time when séances and mysticism were very popular in some circles, Adrian and his apprentice, Jim, decide to hear the man out. Without knowing how much is real and how much is show, the group holds séances to commune with Chapman's late wife, which reveal much about the bride to be--and, unexpectedly, even more about the man Adrian once was.
Morrow has crafted a complicated mystery in Newport, though not of the typical whodunit variety. "There were enough secrets around [the house] to keep even Harry Houdini scratching his head in an effort to sort them all out," she writes. Readers will delight in trying to sort out those very secrets alongside Adrian, Chapman and a Newport-sized household full of strange company. Morrow has done an impressive job of pulling together various stories and threads into a cohesive and fast-paced novel of love and regret. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm