Return to Blackwater House by Vikki Patis
Genre: Psychological thriller, Suspense
Read: 24th February 2022
Published: 1st March 2022
★★★★ 4.5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
You can run from your past, but you can't escape it forever...
Rebecca Bray has moved on from a childhood she wants to forget. She has the dream fiancé, a loving stepdaughter and a career she's proud of.
But with a move back to her hometown of Cornwall, everything she wanted to bury starts to surface. And when her stepdaughter goes missing at a New Year's Eve party, Rebecca must finally face the ghosts of her past - or Ava might never come home safely...
A haunting, addictive read that will keep you up way past your bedtime, and wondering what those bumps in the night really are. Perfect for fans of Nuala Ellwood, Louise Douglas and Sophie Draper.
MY REVIEW:
You can run from your past, but you can't hide forever...
WOW! I have to say I am always partial to thrillers set in Cornwall. No, I've never been there as I live on the other side of the world, but there is just something atmospheric about Cornwall. Imagine sitting there looking out over the Atlantic or the Channel (depending on which coast you are), you're in a sprawling house that has a few ghosts of its own and the wind whipping off the ocean and around the eaves with the rain slapping against the windows. It is the essence of creepy without being creepy.
I'd no sooner begun reading RETURN TO BLACKWATER HOUSE than I felt the same sense of foreboding as when I read Sue Watson's "The Forever Home" (also set in Cornwall). In fact, I think I pictured both houses almost identically. Woman alone in house, wind whipping around the house as the rain slaps against the windows...and then we have a missing girl, lost into the night. It was that same sense I had reading both books. It was chilling. Of course, having said that, both books are entirely different...and yet Cornwall is such a character in its own right that it feels familiar in each story that is set there.
But RETURN TO BLACKWATER HOUSE is different. It is not your usual missing child thriller followed by a frantic search thus concluding with a neat resolution. What makes this story unique is its backstory. It's complex, it's disturbing and it's chilling. A twisted tale that is as addictive as it is atmospheric. And one woman's quest for revenge and absolution.
Growing up in Cornwall, Rebecca Bray had a horribly dismal childhood. Kicked out of home for falling pregnant with her at sixteen, her mother Gemma turned to a life of drugs and alcohol soon selling herself to pay for her addictions. Becks (as she was known then) was left to her own devices. The only place she felt safe was outside under the stars...until one night she found herself at Blackwater House. The woman who lived there, through childish folklore, was rumoured to be a witch but Becks soon discovered that Gwen was a kind and gentle woman who gave a desperate fifteen year old girl a home until she went to university at eighteen. Becks loved her life with Gwen but Gwen encouraged Becks to go out and live her life. So that is what she did.
Almost two decades later, Becks has shed her old life and becomes Rebecca - engaged to Daniel with a beautiful step-daughter Ava - when she receives the news that Gwen has died and left her Blackwater House. Rebecca never thought she would return to Cornwall but maybe this is the perfect opportunity for a fresh start. And maybe, just maybe, she can finally lay her ghosts to rest.
But on New Years Eve, a difficult time for Rebecca that stirs up lots of old memories, Ava disappears in the middle of the night at her own sleepover with friends. It's 2am when distraught and in tears, friend Poppy knocks on the door of the main house alerting Rebecca to Ava's disappearance. Fraught with anxiety, she calls Daniel who is in London at a client's party and summons the police.
Enter Kate, family liaison officer, who incidentally also knew Rebecca (as Becks) when they were younger. She brings the investigative side to the story through her narrative but she also relies on her "intuition", which her DS calls "gut instinct". But she has some difficulty correlating the old Becks with the woman Rebecca and wonders if there is something she is missing.
Rebecca, however, is a deeply broken character with many ghosts that she has not been able to shake in the past two decades. She thought she had left it all behind but returning to Blackwater House has brought all the old ghosts to the surface again which is only exacerbated by Ava's sudden disappearance.
What ensues is the alternating narratives of Rebecca and Kate, beginning to a couple of months before that fateful New Years Eve and following on in the wake of Ava's disappearance. As the story unfolds, the reader begins to see a very different tale emerging that Rebecca has worked hard to keep hidden.
A fast-paced read, RETURN TO BLACKWATER HOUSE is an atmospheric and chilling thriller that is nothing you would expect. It certainly has that menacing eerie sense of foreboding throughout and I think that is best put down to the setting because in all honesty, a Victorian terrace in London would not have the same impact as the dark and chilling presence of a house situated on a rugged cliff edge in Cornwall.
It's also important to note the different aspects dealt with here - addiction, neglect, abuse, rape, teen pregnancy - enmeshed with coeliac disease. However, I think the constant reference to "gluten free" was a tad over-used to the point the reader expects some nefarious character to swap out a gluten free product then sit back and watch things pan out. Once or twice maybe, but every time Rebecca went shopping or cooked a meal? It wasn't necessary as it wasn't an actual focal point of the story.
Aside from that, my only real gripe is with the ending. I get that there needed to be an ending that wrapped things up, but "Seven Years Later" could worked just as well as a simple Epilogue that rounded everything out without notching up several chapters that really didn't go anywhere. I thought the entire Part 3 fell a little flat. I would have preferred just a simple Epilogue taking place from Ava's perspective to give readers a satisfactory explanation and ending. The rest was waffle, in my opinion. It is for this reason I have to reluctantly deduct half a star, otherwise it would have been a perfect 5 star read!
Twisted in more ways than one, RETURN TO BLACKWATER HOUSE is an exciting and engaging read that is not quite what you expect. It is most certainly an atmospheric and chilling thriller filled with suspense and twists that keep on coming.
My second read by author Vikki Patis, I look forward to more of her superbly sinister thrillers. Haunting and chilling, RETURN TO BLACKWATER HOUSE is perfect for fans of dark psychological thrillers.
I would like to thank #VikkiPatis, #Netgalley, #HodderAndStoughton for an ARC of #ReturnToBlackwaterHouse in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
She is represented by Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency and also writes historical fiction as Victoria Hawthorne. Her first historical suspense novel, The House at Helygen, will be published in April 2022 by Quercus, with another to follow in 2023.
Vikki also runs The Bandwagon blog and the Psychological Suspense Authors’ Association, and has written for various publications. After being diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2016 and coeliac disease in 2018, she tries to raise awareness of living with a chronic illness through her writing, and includes a diverse range of characters in her fiction. She lives in Scotland with her wife, two wild golden retrievers, and an even wilder cat.
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