Books
The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

by Eve Chase
Putnam, July 2020, $27

Eve Chase’s psychological suspense thriller The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is an alluring patchwork quilt of guilt and misery. Its convoluted narrative seesaws back and forth between August 1971 and 40 years later with three voices—Rita Murphy, Hera Harrington, and Sylvie Broom—supplying perspectives on the events of the summer of ’71 and its future consequences.

The “barbed and tangled” tale of that summer hinges on two key events: the finding of an abandoned baby girl (Sylvie Broom) and later of a dead body on the estate. It begins when 20-year-old Rita is hired by the well-to-do Harringtons as a nanny for their two children—13-year-old Hera and 5-year-old Teddy. The family has settled unwillingly at their “wrecked beauty” of a country manse on the edge of the Forest Dean after their London townhouse burned down under mysterious circumstances.

Rita should have been suspicious from the start when Walter Harrington asks her to keep a journal and take notes on his wife’s emotional state. Jeannie Harrington suffers from postpartum depression after their third child was stillborn. Walter knows the child was not his and most likely was fathered by his best friend and best man, the movie-star handsome Don Armstrong.

The infant quickly becomes part of the “damage and desire” that haunts everyone for the next four decades. Jeannie latches on to the child as a replacement for her lost daughter; Rita is attached to her as if the baby were her own; and the siblings exhibit varying degrees of affectionate acceptance and rebellious rivalry.

Forty years later, the baby, Sylvie Brown, is a successful makeup artist in London. Sylvie’s own 19-year-old daughter, Annie, discovers a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings and notes about the abandoned child and the murdered interloper and decides she wants to unravel the threads of her mother’s story and her family’s secret history.

One unexpected bombshell after another explodes as the intricate story of the many daughters of Foxcote Manor is exposed. Local colorful characters—housekeeper Marge Grieves who had a “voice that could pickle onions”; talented carpenter Robbie Rigby who whittles a rustic mobile for the foundling; a hovering caregiver with the creepy name of Fingers Jonson—and murky regional details blend into unguessable patterns that finally resolve in atonement and a most absorbing read.

Robert Allen Papinchak
Teri Duerr
6995
Chase
July 2020
the-daughters-of-foxcote-manor
27
Putnam