Book #28: The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

This is the third book I've read by Kate Morton (the others being The Forgotten Garden and The Secret Keeper), and I think this was my favorite. Morton has a similar style and theme to each of her books--mainly, someone in the present trying to unravel a mystery from her family's past, using whatever documents and memories she  (it's usually a woman) can find to help her figure it out. In this book, Edie's mother gets a 50-year-old letter delivered in the mail, which had been lost thanks to a mailman's laziness. Thanks to that letter, Edie finds out that her mother was evacuated from London during the Blitz in WWII and that she lived in Milderhurst castle at that time, something her mother had never told her about. Her mother was so secretive about it that Edie determined she had to find out whatever she could--and managed to make her way to Milderhurst castle to talk to the women living inside.

I love how Morton always manages to make the ending a surprise--how there are just layers upon layers of story, where at first you believe something at the beginning and then you later find out more and more information that makes you believe something else. My perception of the situation changed several times throughout the book, and I loved how it ended up. At first you think that the old ladies living in the castle are just nice old ladies, then you start to think there's other, more negative forces at play in their relationship, and then you find out that there's much more to the story. I loved that. Morton definitely is a very skilled writer with a gift for writing a fascinating and not-too-revealing plot.

I felt like The Distant Hours was possibly the most believable of the mysteries because of the methods in which Edie tried to figure out the mystery--it was mostly just through talking to the people who lived through it (because, conveniently, they were all mostly still alive--it just was a matter of getting them to want to talk about it). Whereas in The Forgotten Garden especially, I felt like it was kind of cheating in how so many things just "happened" to fall into place and so many random things turned up to help the main character with her research, this book didn't have that kind of feel. I did get a bit confused by the timeline sometimes--it was set in 1992, but then it was talking about events that happened during WWII in 1941. But the characters' actions didn't seem to match their ages at times. The women in the castle would have been nearly 90 but they didn't seem to act like it, and I could never figure out how old Edie's mother was at different times.