Customer Reviews

The Flourish: Murder in the Family (Ekstasis Noir)

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Three haunting violent deaths - an actual history that evokes shadows of Wuthering Heights.
In The Flourish, well-known artist and author Heather Spears spirits the reader away into 1880's Scotland, where small-village lives are both enriched and twisted by familial duty - bound within the lessons of piety, proper conduct and compartmentalized social status.
A village family makes room in their home for a bereaved niece, now alone after her brother and then her father have died. Charlotte is a young Scottish spinster with glowing red hair - endowed with musical gifts, intelligence, imagination, forthrightness - and a toughness and determination to work and set her own life-course.

So--is this another 1800's period romance novel about a woman in reduced circumstances struggling to achieve independence and find true love? Absolutely not!! Heather Spears is an author to be reckoned with - luring us into her unflinching tour de force of meticulous research and story telling, undertaken with empathy and respect for her own family history.
This very human drama is that best of unforgettable reading experiences - a simple tale of rich inner life .. a very promising life of active endeavor, nurtured by scraps of dreams and realistic hopes and love. And, although burdened by deadening rounds of daily tasks accepted as one's moral duty, Charlotte's surrounding world is enrapturing as recreated by the author in all its stark beauty - gaslights and candle-lit rooms, moonlight along the river path, fire-warmed meeting halls, storms and ice. The harsh seasons always pass, giving way to the softly exquisite promise of "The flourish" when swelling buds burst forth - joy alive.

But Charlotte is unaware of another gathering force, entrapping her - the derangement of chronic illness with its enforced solitude and desolation of hopes tumbling into a maze of weakness and anger - a force that will set the conditions for a night of tragedy in this quiet village.
Like a sip of aged single-malt, this book rings true and stays with you.