Customer Reviews

Poison to Purge Melancholy (The Pat Montello Mysteries)

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What could be worse than arriving at your future in-laws at Christmastime without your boyfriend, and with his sullen teenage daughter? How about having your gynecologist show up for the family celebration? How about feeling the presence of ghosts in a colonial house in Williamsburg?

Elena Santangelo brings back Pat Montella in this fascinating mystery. Pat has communicated with ghosts before, linking murders from the past with current events. This time, she promised her boyfriend she will have nothing further to do with ghosts. Then she feels fear when she is in the old parts of Gladys Lee's colonial home, and even feels the affects of poisoning. In a parallel storyline, a music master in Williamsburg in 1783 witnesses the illness and subsequent death of a lodger in the Carson house, the house that Gladys Lee lives in two hundred years later.

Santangelo does a wonderful job in combining romance, history, mystery and the paranormal while writing two storylines, one set in colonial Williamsburg, one two centuries later. Pat Montella and her mentor, Miss Maggie Shelby, are fascinating, well-rounded characters who are intelligent enough to make the link between events that occur so far apart.

Highly recommended for lovers of American history and historical mystery.

Pat Montella arrives in Colonial Williamsburg escorting a sullen teenager, her future step-daughter. Beth Ann's father Hugh Lee and Miss Maggie Shelby will arrive later in the day so Pat must face her prospective mother-in-law on her own.
Pat has made a promise to Hugh of no more ghosts, but the spirit world will not allow her to keep her pledge. Elena Santangelo has the skill to move the reader back and forth from current time to the 18th century without a feeling of disruption. Ghosts of Christmas past collide with murder in current time in a house filled with doctors who have constant battle of one upmanship. Pat is drawn against her will back to the past and an ancient murder while the family consumes a feast of colonial abundance.
Miss Maggie devours the food and the clues while enlightening the reader on early Virginia history, which makes for an unexpected, but satisfying conclusion.
This is an excellent series for all the right seasons. It has ghosts, murder, romance and mystery.
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I've read all the Pat Montella mysteries, and they just keep getting better. "Poison" is a terrific read...carefully researched, tightly written, and with characters you care about in spite of their flaws. Santangelo's settings are so real, so vivid, they made me yearn for Christmas in August.

It is all about balance. Elena beautifully maintained the balance between the two storylines of past and present, descriptions and actions, romance and intellectualism, mystery and revelations. Her characters were wonderfully deep and were easy to love even for their flaws. I found myself "picking up" the book at any free moment (I have the kindle version) even if I could only read a couple of pages. After reading everything that is available from Elena on the Kindle, I can definitively say that I enjoy her writing as much as I enjoy that of Dame Agatha Christie.