Hello!
I just finished the book by Ruth Ware,
The Death of Mrs. Westaway.
The novel opens on, well, a dark and stormy night as a lone young woman scurries her way homeward along a deserted seaside promenade. Harriet “Hal” Westaway is 21 years old. She never knew her father’s identity, and ever since the hit-and-run death of her mother three years ago, Hal has been eking out a living reading tarot cards in a seedy resort town on the English Channel.
When she arrives home, she has two letters: One is a threat from a loan shark she naively borrowed money from months ago. The other is from a solicitor’s firm in Cornwall, informing Hal of the death of her maternal grandmother and summoning Hal to a reading of the will. The tantalizing phrase “substantial size of the estate” catches Hal’s eye. The only problem is, Hal knows that her mother’s mother died decades ago; the lawyer must have her confused with another Harriet Westaway.
Hal is a person of integrity, but she’s also desperate. Hal decides to board a train for Cornwall and pass herself off as the missing Westaway granddaughter. If she’s exposed as a fraud, she’ll be packed off to prison, so Hal steels herself to pull off the ultimate con game.
This book is a thriller and mystery, but not in the typical sense. It’s a story with many different layers and will keep you guessing who is really who and who is a good person and who is a player and who is being played. There’s not an intense scene where you wonder how a character will “get out” of a situation, but an unfolding story about a family with secrets. A really good story that will keep your attention.
I give this one 4 out of 5 stars.