The Winter People

This book challenged a lot of my “rarely” reading habits: I rarely read Adventure-Suspense titles, rarely read books with a supernatural element, rarely start something as an audiobook and grab the hard copy because I can’t wait to see how it ends, and rarely finish one book by an author and immediately start reading another, but all of those things happened with The Winter People, a chilly and fast-paced mix of historical fiction, ghost story, family drama and thriller. The story takes place in quaint West Hall, Vermont, a town with a local legend: that of Sara Harrison Shea, murdered in 1908. We hear from Sara through the words of her secret diary -- a diary that, in the present day, becomes an object that people are desperate to possess. What information is contained in the missing pages? Who murdered Sara? Does her ghost really roam the sleeping neighborhoods of West Hall, looking for offerings from its residents? Her story is intertwined with a pair of current mysteries: the disappearance of a local mother, and the death of a man whose wife wants to know what he was doing in West Hall, far from home, the day that he was killed. Author McMahon has the ability to combine constant action with lovely little details about the New England setting, especially when we’re back in 1908 with the doomed Sara Harrison Shea. Haunting, in every sense.