
Book Description
Love is a battlefield. Who will get out of it alive?
Harry Duncan Wood runs a hotel in the historic city of Bath with his beautiful young wife. When he falls in love with Mill House, an old greystone farmhouse on the banks of river Avon among the soaring hills of Somerset, and sets about moving his family there, the first appearances of the cracks in the marriage take him by surprise. Is his wife seeing another man? Duncan needs to get to the bottom of the affairs for his own sanity. Sometimes, however, ignorance is bliss and will also keep everybody alive.
My review
'The Closet' by Jac Wright is a very clever and well-written short story.
Harry Duncan Wood runs a hotel in the city of Bath together with his young second wife Carrie. They live in the same hotel, but Duncan has recently puchased and is in the process of renovating a large, run-down, old Mill House in a desolate place in the hills, with the intention of converting it to a hotel and to come to live in it.
At the beginning of the story, Duncan is on his way to the Mill House in quite a foul mood. He is suspecting that his wife Carrie is having an affair under his nose. He has a plan to find out if this is true or not. He falsely tells her that he is going to France for 5 days on business. Soon after he overhears her on an excited telephone conversation with someone planning to spend some time together with this person in the Mill House while he's abroad.
That morning, Duncan leaves no clues of his arrival in the Mill House and he hides in the bedroom closet waiting for Carrie and this other person's arrival. What happens then? Is he correct in his suspicions? Is she really betraying him or is it just his overworking imagination? Who is this other person? How will this story end?
I really enjoyed myself reading this book as it is extemely well-written. I could almost hear the wind howling and the sound of the stream as it passes beneath the Mill House. My only complaint is that I thought it would be a longer story; it was in fact extremely short. When I arrived at 50% of the ebook, thinking I was half down the story, it suddenly ended and the other half of the book was just information about and the starting chapters of the author's novel 'The Reckless Engineer'.