SUSPICION

Suspicion
by Barbara Rogan
Simon & Schuster
$24.00
hardcover
ISBN 0-684-81415-3, 1999

I fell in love with the setting. How could anyone resist a house that has a spiral staircase leading up to the library in a tower? The sides of the corridor along the ascending staircase have cabinet handles and drawer pulls for storage of books. Who cares if the upper room might be haunted and has blood stains under the carpet when you could have a library like that!

Reluctantly, I need to go back to the reality of the book. (Sigh.)

This book takes place in an old Victorian mansion overlooking the Long Island Sound with an octagonal tower library in the house. (Sigh).

The plot involved the new owners of this wonderful house with the previous dead owners of the house. The main character, Emma Roth, is a novelist that is coincidentally writing a ghost story with the previous owner being an English teacher that enjoys correcting the story with a purple pencil while being a ghost. Emma is carrying quite a bit of emotional baggage with her which provides the reader with questions and suspense throughout the book. Many times Emma wonders if her problem involves her emotional instability, her stress, her readjustment to a new situation, her dreams, or if the house really possesses a ghost.

The characters are believable and Ms. Roth has described each of them so well that I found myself predicting their thoughts and actions. Each character possessed a strong personal voice with the development of the plot. The relationship between the characters I found to be very realistic especially between Emma and her husband who worked as a physicist. I found the sense of humor between the two and the acceptance of each others faults to be refreshing with their sense of commitment to each other. One of my favorite passages regarded their "elastic minute" meaning the flexibility of time perception with each person. The analogies and comparisons throughout the book allowed me to constantly visualize the characters and the incidents.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. My biggest criticism of it would be that the mystery was very apparent to me from the beginning and who the culprit was, but I enjoyed reading about the relationship and the constant questioning of the existence of the ghost. Also, I felt that the editor from Simon & Schuster should have had the editing ghost with purple pencil looking for the typographical errors in the book since the editor did not.