Publisher's Weekly Review
Bliss House, with its blood-stained history of madness and murder, would scare off most potential buyers, but not interior decorator Rainey Bliss Adams, in Benedict's creepy, solidly crafted supernatural suspense novel. In the wake of the gas explosion in St. Louis that killed her husband and left her 14-year-old daughter, Ariel, badly burned, Rainey moves to Virginia's Blue Ridge foothills to buy the ancestral home that she fell in love with as a child. For Ariel, the nightmare begins in the wee hours after the housewarming party, when she groggily sees what appears to be a spectral young woman fall to her death from the third-floor balcony; the next morning, there's a very real body. Lines between fact and fantastic, past and present, increasingly blur, as Benedict (Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts) interweaves the ensuing murder investigation with the chilling story of a young woman kept as a sex slave within Bliss House's walls a generation earlier. The final revelation hits horrifyingly close to home for Rainey. Agent: Susan Raihofer, David Black Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
After the explosion at her St. Louis home leaving her husband dead and her 14-year-old daughter, Ariel, disfigured Rainey Adams wants a fresh start. So she buys Bliss House, her ancestral, nineteenth-century Virginia country home, despite its murderous reputation. Here Rainey feels she's come home, while Ariel senses her father's presence and sees her healing accelerating. But the aftermath of a gala housewarming party shatters the sense of well-being: during the night, Ariel sees a ghostly woman take a deadly fall, and in the morning Rainey finds the body of her real-estate agent in the hallway. A near-lethal assault and a related murder follow, as Ariel explores the house and becomes more affected by it. Woven through this narration is the generation-old story of a woman's imprisonment in a secluded underground chamber of the house, a stunning account that a member of the Bliss family finally feels compelled to reveal to Rainey. Benedict combines the supernatural with the all-too-real, peopling the haunted-house milieu with psychopaths and adding elements of guilt and betrayal for an engrossing and suspenseful read.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
