The Woman In White

The story progresses at a smart pace and fills the 600+ pages with suspense and

actions. With no long-winded repetitive description of scenaries or dozens of

rare words a page to look up in the dictionary, it evolves around characters of

generations and layer by layer reveals how sins and, for some, mistakes and

weaknesses, run their courses and how slowly but finely the wheels of justice grind.

After some background, the author set a trap with a job appointment at

Limmeridge to tutor two ladies to draw and the strange woman in white, a runaway

from an asylum, whom Walter met on his way back to London in that fateful

moon-lit night. An air of doom descended even before he left for the post.

Naturally, he fell in love with his pupil, Mss Fairlie, and had to give up as he

was out of class and more importantly she was already engaged. Walter did the

honorable thing by quitting and now the story really started. Step by step, from

bad to worse, the reader witnesses the lady fell deeper into the clutches of a rogue

who only wanted her money. Her life was in danger as she refused to cave in to her

husband's demands.

Like The Moonstone, the tale consists of narrations of several characters and

is again about love and crime. Unlike in the detective novel, even the master

villain gets to tell his side of the story. Two thirds in, I literally couldn't

put it down and found myself finishing the book in the small hours on Monday Aug

5.

I love this author's style! I felt like having made a discovery of something

hidden in plain sight.