Danielle MacKinnon’s nearly thirty and still hasn’t got her life sorted. She’s broke, hates her job as PA to the blithely privileged Jeannie, and now a break-up has left her with nowhere to live.
It comes as a surprise when Jeannie suggests that Danielle stay at Westerley, the sprawling Yorkshire estate where she grew up. They need someone to look after the place anyway.
At Westerley, Danielle luxuriates in her idyllic, borrowed life as lady of the manor – but the house is strange, uneasy. that started in London has followed her there.
Then Jeannie arrives unannounced. Working for Jeannie, serving her, living in her house, the razor-thin boundaries between Danielle and her boss begin to dissolve. Soon their relationship slides into one that is older, stranger and harder to name.
Something is happening at Westerley. Things where they shouldn’t be. The shadow of a maid sweeping in the dawn light. But is the house really haunted? Or is Danielle?
Lauren Mooney is a writer from the East Midlands. She works in theatre and audio drama, and has co-run Kandinsky Theatre Company since 2015, making award-winning shows across the UK and Europe. She is a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing Prose MA, where she held the David Higham Scholarship. She lives in south London with her husband Stewart and their tortoise, Sacher Tort. Service is her first novel.
My thoughts: Danielle is coasting through life, she’s stuck in an assistant’s job at a charity that doesn’t seem to really do anything, working for Jeannie, who treats her like a dogsbody, sending her to do the weekly shop and her errands.
When Danielle’s best friend tells her she can’t sleep on the sofa in her house share anymore (her ex is in their flat), she’s suddenly homeless. When Jeannie suggests she stay at her family’s moldering house Westerley and look after it, she accepts.
But the night terrors and sleep paralysis that have been plaguing her seem to be worse in Yorkshire than they were in London and she’s even starting to see things in the daytime. Bowls of peaches seem to appear, a maid in the corridor when she’s the only person in the house.
Then Jeannie and her son pitch up, the roof of their London home having caved in, and suddenly Danielle is cooking and cleaning for them and sleeping in the old servants’ quarters in the attic, and her strange visions are getting even more real.
I liked Danielle, I’ve been a PA, although thankfully not for anyone as entitled as Jeannie, and I have an ancestor who was a housemaid (my great-grandmother) so I recognised that in her.
She’s clearly struggling with her life, her relationship has ended and she’s stuck in a rut with her job, her strange experience at the house, the visions and the increasingly real haunting seem like warning signals that she needs to change things, to start over and stop letting life happen to her.
A really interesting and enjoyable read.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 