The Lake House by Kate Morton

★★★★★

"Life was like that, doors of possibility constantly opening and closing as one blindly made one's way through."

I have loved Kate Morton's books ever since reading 'The Forgotten Garden' a few years ago - with her most recent being 'The Secret Keeper' and could not wait to read this one!  I literally had a count down to the publication date, but life has a way of distracting me lately and I ended up waiting a month or two to read it.  Well worth the wait!

In usual Kate Morton fashion, The Lake House, is full of intrigue, family secrets, and unexpected connections - with some history and a little romance thrown in there as well.  The novel weaves back and forth between 16-year-old Alice Edevane in 1933, living at her family's estate, the 'Lake House' and a young women named Sadie seventy years later who, while on leave from her job as a detective, stumbles on the old house.  Left in ruins after the family's baby son, Theo, mysteriously disappeared on the night of the annual Midsummer party, the house is full of secrets waiting to be unraveled.  Coping with her own troubled past, Sadie begins to dig deeper into the Edevane's past and soon finds herself absorbed in finding out exactly what happened to Theo on the night of the party.

This one took me a little while to get into, - there was a lot of things going on in the beginning that took sometime to come together - but after a few chapters, I was hooked.  Kate Morton has the wonderful ability to connect story lines in both the past and the present with seamless effort.  Her fairy-tale like description of her settings are beautiful and captivating and this novel was not exception.  And the characterization is spot on - by the middle of her novels, I feel so absorbed in the characters and, as much as I can't stop reading the book, there is always a huge part of me that doesn't want it to end because I will inevitably have to leave the characters behind.

A wonderful book by an amazing author and storyteller!  I can't wait to see what else Kate Morton is up to next.

This book was #2 on my top ten list of 2015.