Once upon a time Orla was a woman, a painter, a lover. Now she is a mother and a wife, and when her husband Nick suggests that their city apartment has grown too small for their lives, she agrees. She agrees again when Nick announces that he has found a Georgian house on the Dorset cliffs--a good house for children, he says. But as the family settles into the mansion--Nick absent all week, commuting to the city--Orla finds herself unsettled.
The mystery of the Reeve urges the female protagonists — each without a husband at home — toward moments of self-discovery ... The horror surfaces only in the presence of women, who are as abandoned as the house in the periods between its inhabitants.
It has a little bit of all things not very nice that make up a page-turning popular novel, without resorting to moral simplicity or predictability ... [Collins] evokes her characters and scenes deftly. Not only that, but the whole thrust and purpose of the book add up so well, issues are handled with such lightness of touch, that this reads like a novelist in her prime, rather than a beginner.
