The Restoration by J H Moncrieff

I would like to thank Anne from Random Things Tours and Flame Tree Press for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Flame Tree Press

Published – Out Now

Price – £12.95 paperback £5.91 Kindle eBook

It was the perfect opportunity…or so she thought. When Terri Foxworth is hired to spend a year restoring a crumbling manor house, she believes she’s hit the jackpot. She moves in with her young daughter and high hopes for the project’s success. As the restoration begins to go terribly wrong, she realizes dark forces won’t let her leave the house until its horrible secrets are revealed.

This job could very well be the death of her

So if you knew your house was haunted why would you stay? Keeping your characters in a dangerous place and its always fascinating to see how various writers approach this. In J H Moncrieff’s unusual The Restoration we have a haunted house and a mystery where simple employment is the carrot or is that the cheese in the mousetrap?

Terri Foxworth is delighted to be offered an opportunity to renovate Glenvale House in the US – she is recently divorced and wants to ensure she and her daughter Dallas get the chance to start a new life. Working for the rich Miss Henrietta Vandermere she soon finds she was not first choice; or second; or third and admits that people felt there was something weird about the building. Slowly Terri realises Miss Vandermere was telling a few more ‘white lies’ and soon finds herself with a strange ex-employee of the House telling her about its secrets and most worryingly Dallas has found a friend calling himself Niles but the last Niles died nearly a century ago.

This is an enjoyable ghost story and I enjoyed the slow pressure cooker that Moncrieff creates with Terri being desperate for cash and yet finding Dallas seemingly changed. It keeps us guessing initially if Niles is real but soon, we realise that he is indeed a real unpleasant ghost and he isn’t yet aware he is dead. We get a taste of the gothic with family secrets finally coming to the surface and then intriguingly the sinister appearance of Niles and his fixation on Dallas. It’s a classic approach but works because of Terri’s mixture of bravery and vulnerability in not letting the impulse to run fast succeed. Moncrieff makes Terri and Dallas the heart of the story and throws all these strange sinister people at them to see how they react and that was for me the enjoyable part of the story.

The Restoration is a fine spooky read that will comfortably unsettle you in that house you sit in all alone with no one in the room by you. Well… no one visible…yet. A fun traditional ghost story with some nice unnerving touches.