My Cousin Rachel

i think i prefer rebecca to this, but it was a good and enticing read nonetheless.

similar to henry james' the turn of the screw, du maurier employs an unreliable narrator tinged with paranoia and ambiguity that leaves the reader unsure of trusting much. like rebecca, the circumstances of a character's death will have you tapping your chin in suspicion, but that is not the only motivation to read this book in one setting.

my only gripes are the narrator and that it was predictably too much like rebecca, although this fact is advertised openly (at least on the copy i own). i found philip ashley absolutely annoying and naïve, despite having been brought up to be otherwise. he reminds me of edith wharton's newland archer from the age of innocence, so to summarise this book was read hoping the narrator would fall from grace in the end. then from the start, i knew who was going to die, and who would be suspected of the murder, which is not what i want out of a mystery novel. but unlike rebecca and more similar to turn of the screw, the ambiguity is stronger in this novel, which might be more appealing to some. personally, i wanted the answer to this whodunnit, and because i didn't get it on top of having to put up with an annoying narrator, i demoted this one to four stars.

perhaps read my cousin rachel before rebecca.