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, a white wrought-iron bench under an apple tree, along with a huge, overgrown garden full of fruit trees and flowers. It's in this new spot that 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.
Readers also learn the history of the cottage and become acquainted with the many members of the family who lived there more than 150 years before Mary and Graham move in. There are eight children, including Eliza, who is the narrator for these sections of the book.
Eliza introduces the redheaded stranger who arrived on the night of a terrible storm. Struck by a fallen tree, he isn't supposed to live, but he does, and stays with the family, working in the fields and with the animals on the farm. The younger children instantly accept the young man, but Eliza has her doubts about him.
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 are blended well, with high drama on both fronts as readers learn about the tragic events in Mary's life and what happened to Eliza and her family. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer
Shelf Talker: A haunted cottage in the English countryside is the setting for a psychological ghost story full of violence and tragedy.