Set in the quiet English countryside, Julie Myerson's The Stopped Heart is a creepy story filled with ghosts from the distant and near pasts, and the psychological twists and turns that accompany massive grief. In the present, Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have endured a terrible blow and moved to the country to put their former life behind them. The cottage they purchase has been vacant for years, but still has many of the old fixtures and features: a steep, narrow staircase from the kitchen to the upstairs, a scrubbed-pine table, an old stone trough and water pump in the front yard. Here Graham hopes Mary can overcome her grief and begin to show an interest in living again--and in him. Left alone much of the time, though, Mary begins to sense something is not quite right with the house and property as she intuits and then sees snatches of people moving through the same space she occupies.
Myerson rapidly interweaves both the present and the past, jumping from one subplot to the other within paragraphs. This can be slightly confusing and a bit irritating as the tension from one scene is often cut short when she moves into the other storyline. However, the juxtaposition of both past and present is blended well, with high drama on both fronts as readers learn about the tragic events in Mary's life and what happened in the house's history. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer