As their father starts to drink and removes himself further from his children, Edmund and Georgina cling more and more to each other and to their cousins Louisa and Roland. Their intertwined lives are constantly watched by longtime housemaid, Ada Pepper, who has been with the family since before Freddie died. Georgina eventually marries, but is unhappy and pursues an affair, fairly publicly, and a second clandestinely. When her husband is found dead of a drug overdose, Georgina is accused and prosecuted for the murder, but acquitted. After the trial, she retreats further into herself and her life with Edmund, who has spent his life pining over unnamed, but easily guessed, unrequited love.

Along with Ada, the siblings become recluses, living hermit-like existences in a house cluttered with their accumulations. The police find the three dead of gunshot wounds in the locked house and assume it was a double murder-suicide, but aren’t sure who it started and ended with.

The book is a recounting of these three lives and the events that lead up to the final, fatal tragedy. Told in three, alternating voices, Georgina’s, Edmund’s and Ada’s, the book gets off to an awkward start, until the reader realizes how far back in time the story has gone. The prologue to the book is an obituary for Louisa, set in modern times and used as a springboard to summarize the events that ended in three deaths forty-years prior.

While the family described is very tragic, they seem tragic of their own doing. Georgina manipulates everyone and everything to suit her and can be imagined as a master puppeteer. Edmund is very much under everyone’s control, especially Georgina’s, and can never muster the courage to break out until it is too late. Ada, on the other hand, is offered several chances to break free of this family and the hold Georgina has over them, yet due to some ill-placed loyalties, remains with them too long.

There is some wondering about the final deaths and some of the previous events, but none of it is very suspenseful, and most of the trio’s secrets are easy enough to figure out. A tragic ending is the only possible ending for this twisted family. Everyone confessing to his or her part in this family’s demise does offer a little interest at the end of the book.

--Jennifer Monahan Winberry