Stevie‘s review of The Au Pair by Emma Rous
Contemporary Women’s Mystery Fiction published by Berkley 08 Jan 19
I love it when a really twisty mystery emerges from just one small inconsistency, particularly when that previously missed detail has the characters doubting everything they previously held to be true. Of course, the solution to the mystery has to be properly satisfying for the premise to work properly.
Seraphine Mayes is sorting through old papers in the house where she has lived her entire life, following her father’s sudden death, when she comes across a photograph of her parents holding a newborn baby. It must have been taken on the day she and her twin brother were born – indeed the date on the back tells her as much – since her mother committed suicide mere hours later. Her older brother, who was four at the time, remembers the photograph being taken, but has no idea which twin is shown, or where the other might have been. Concern, based on a long-held fear of being the outsider in a close-knit family, drives Seraphine to seek out the au pair who took the photograph, but initially Laura wants nothing to do with her.
Seraphine resolves to seek answers from others who were living in the area at the time, but for every partial answer she receives, more questions crop up. She knows her mother had mental health issues throughout her marriage, and that was why the family had employed an au pair, and it seems likely that the one other outsider who might be able to help is a family friend, who briefly lived nearby but who left soon after Seraphine’s mother died and dropped all contact with them. As Seraphine becomes aware of threats made towards potential witnesses, and veiled threats are made anonymously towards her as well, unless she drops the investigation, she begins to wonder whether her father’s death was really an accident.
This was a gripping story, told alternately from the viewpoints of Seraphine’s present and Laura’s past. When the solution is presented, everything slots into place very tidily, although I suspect different readers will have their own opinions as to a couple of events that may be interpreted in more than one way each. I’m desperately keen to see what the author comes up with next.
Grade: A
Summary:
A grand estate, terrible secrets, and the young woman who bears witness to it all…
Seraphine Mayes and her brother Danny are known as the summer-born Summerbournes: the first set of summer twins to be born at Summerbourne House. But on the day they were born their mother threw herself to her death, the au pair fled, and the village thrilled with whispers of dark-cloaked figures and a stolen baby.
Now twenty-five, and mourning the recent death of her father, Seraphine uncovers a family photograph taken on the day the twins were born featuring both parents posing with just one baby. Seraphine soon becomes fixated with the notion that she and Danny might not be twins after all, that she wasn’t the baby born that day and that there was more to her mother’s death than she has ever been told…
Why did the au pair flee that day?
Where is she now?
Does she hold the key to what really happened?
Read an excerpt.
