Five Mile House [Hardcover]

Karen Novak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2000

A modern day mystery haunted by a 19th Century ghost.

Eleanor Bly haunts Five Mile House, looking for someone to tell her story to. Jumping from a window to her death in 1889, Eleanor's soul is at unrest until the truth is told about her life and death. She finally finds Leslie, one hundred years later. Leslie bears an uncanny resemblance to Eleanor and is sympathetic if only because of the ghost she carries around herself...

In a moment of temporary insanity, Leslie shoots and kills the suspected perpetrator of a hideous child murder. When evidence is inconclusive, Leslie enters a severe depression and is temporarily institutionalized. When she is released from the hospital, her husband, in an effort to change their environment, takes his family to a small New England town to work on a mysterious restoration project of Five Mile House. It doesn't take long for them to hear about Eleanor, a 19th century madwoman who murdered her seven children in Five Mile House. Leslie becomes obsessed with Eleanor's story, suspecting that the truth may be different from the accepted myth. Wellington, locally known for its coven of wiccan followers, has many secrets of its own.

The stories of both women are told in parallel narratives until they converge at the very end. As frightening as it is suspenseful, Five Mile House is a classic page-turner, a haunted house story and also the story about the lengths a mother will go to in order to protect her children.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Karen Novak's remarkably polished first novel is a story of two women separated by a century and linked by the suspicion of madness and the lingering traces of guilt. In 1889, Eleanor Bly murdered her six children and flung herself from the tower of Five Mile House. More than a hundred years later, her ghost, who narrates much of the novel, reaches out to Leslie Stone, a New York cop who has killed a child murderer and is haunted by her action. The house is their common ground. When Leslie's husband comes to Wellington to restore the house for a deep-pocketed local historical organization bent on marketing the town's local witch lore to the vacationing masses, Eleanor finds an audience and Leslie finds... what? "Her fascination with the house was indeed connected to something else, and if she stared at Five Mile House long enough the image before her would rearrange itself into the form of what she really sought."

Eleanor and Leslie (whose physical resemblance to the 19th-century Medea is uncanny) are, of course, on mirroring quests for redemption, a prize which, the madwoman's ghost realizes, carries a heavy price: "I do not crave the truth; I dread it.... Yet, without the opportunity to tell my story, all that is left me is the ephemeral, disjointed speculations of others. It is for this reason I protect Five Mile House, to hold my story safe. I protect it from the living who climb the hill to see the relic of a mad woman and pay no heed to the implications of madness in the house itself."

The trope of the madwoman in the attic has a long and distinguished literary history (think Jane Eyre), and contains a complex tangle of repressed sexual power, threatening desire, and narrative control. Novak uses the metaphor as a springboard into an exploration of history and memory--and into a rollickingly good story, complete with a search for an ancient godhead text, battling covens, and herb-induced suicide. Skillfully interweaving its 19th- and 20th-century tales, accelerating toward a simultaneous revelation of treachery and murder, Novak's ghost story is astonishingly well-balanced, elegant, and spooky. The author's deft touch imbues the novel with a dark gothicism that never veers toward the eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging absurd. Her first effort should win Novak a legion of fans. --Kelly Flynn

From Publishers Weekly

In this strong debut, Novak combines suspense with modern witchcraft. Police detective Leslie Stone, a child abuse specialist, shoots an assumed perpetrator; after recuperation in a mental hospital, she leaves the police force. Then her carpenter husband, Greg, accepts an important restoration job at historic Five Mile House in the seemingly idyllic village of Wellington, whose main employer, a concrete recycling plant, is run by Wiccans who are searching for an ancient magical text. So is Harry Wellington, the owner of Five Mile House. As a curious Leslie researches the history of Wellington, Five Mile House and the deaths of the last family who inhabited itAthe mother, Eleanor Bly, supposedly murdered seven of her children and committed suicideAshe realizes she looks exactly like Eleanor. Is it coincidence or the reason the Stones were lured to Wellington? Leslie begins an edgy affair with local lawyer Phillip Hogarth and is befriended by enigmatic herbalist Gwen Garrett. Meanwhile, the ghosts of Eleanor and Amy, whose murder ended Leslie's police career, hover. Eleanor's ghost narrates part of the story, with some disconcerting shifts in tense. By the conclusion, Novak has the reader on tenterhooks as Leslie finds herself in mortal danger. Although this is more a damsel-in-distress novel with a supernatural bent than a traditional mystery, Novak successfully weaves the components together and leaves an opening for a sequel. Agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman at Elaine Markson. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1st Am Edition edition (October 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158234096X
• ISBN-13: 978-1582340968
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #429,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tremendous page-turner, September 24, 2000

By 

Lorraine Berry (Ithaca, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Five Mile House (Hardcover)

How far would you go to protect your children? Would you kill for them? That's the question that I was left with after zipping through this intelligent, well-written, spooky, thrill ride of a book. Karen Novak has sent her main character, Leslie Stone, on a hero's quest involving a search for a sacred manuscript. The biggest part of the quest is Leslie's attempt to come to terms with her who she is and what she has done. You see, Leslie Stone is a detective, and, as the book opens, she has been sent to investigate the murder of yet another child, a four-year old girl who reminds her way too much of her own four-year old daughter. Before the end of the day, the suspect in this awful crime will be dead at Leslie's hands. Her life in shambles after serving her sentence, Leslie and her family move out to the country where her husband has gotten a job restoring an old mansion. This mansion, is, of course, haunted. But this is no ordinary ghost; Five Mile House is inhabited by a spirit who is as troubled as Leslie. This spirit, a woman, supposedly killed all of her children and then killed herself. Ever the detective, Leslie wonders if the legend covers up a grisly crime, and she sets out to investigate. There is a ton of stuff to talk about in this book, but I'm afraid I've come close to revealing too much already. I would highly recommend it.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN GHOST STORY AND IMPRESSIVE DEBUT NOVEL, September 16, 2001

By 

Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Five Mile House (Hardcover)

This is a well crafted and beautifully written debut novel that is impressive. A modern day ghost story with Gothic underpinnings, it is a page turner, full of suspense and mystery. It is an intelligent ghost story that is as ephemeral, as it is gripping.

The story revolves around a married female detective, Leslie Stone, who lives with her husband, Greg, and her two young daughters, Molly and Emma. One morning, Leslie goes to work on a particularly brutal child homicide. A perpetrator is in custody, and when Leslie goes to interview him, she snaps and metes out a form of vigilante justice that is final and irrevocable. Arrested, charged with murder, and tried, she is found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Confined for months to a mental hospital, she is finally released.

Her husband, a building contractor, having anticipated the notoriety attendant with is wife's release, gets a job that enables them to move to a new place and get a fresh start, or so he thinks. They move to the small New England town of Wellington, where he is able to obtain his dream job, the restoration of an unusual house named Five Mile House. The catch here is that Five Mile House has had its own share of notoriety. A century ago, a woman, Eleanor Bly, killed her children, then herself in that house. Moreover, it is located in a town riddled with witches, adherents to the ancient Wiccan religion.

Leslie, a detective down to her very soul, soon discovers that she is Eleanor Bly's doppelganger, and that the dream job her husband got was not by chance. Moreover, she senses that there is something about the house that is evil. The past soon begins to collide with the present, as Eleanor reaches out to Leslie to try and set the record straight about what really happened at Five Mile House all those years ago. What she reveals, bit by bit, will keep the reader turning the pages.

It is only at the end that the auther stumbles a bit, as she tries to bring closure to her story. It is still, however, a debut novel to remember.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but not strong, either, November 30, 2004

By 

gothic cowgirl (NorCal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Mile House: A Novel (Paperback)

I enjoyed reading Karen Novak's debut novel, and I am interested in reading more of her work. That said, "Five Mile House" is a quick engaging read, but leaves much to be desired. The supernatural connection between the main character and the narrator never becomes clear, and the plot has way too many holes and is a bit too outlandish for easy acceptance. I don't want to beat this horse to death as there are already so many reviews, so let me just leave you my suggestion: check the book out at the library before you buy. It's likable, but not one I'd read again.