Skip to main content

The Tale of Halcyon Crane by Wendy Webb


The Tale of Halcyon Crane by Wendy Webb is a spooky ghost story.  Spooky.  Creepy.

One day out of the blue Hallie James receives a bewildering and shocking missive from an attorney on Grand Manitou Island, Michigan, that shatters everything she ever knew about her past and about her father.  The letter claims that Hallie's mother, Madlyn Crane, a famous photographer, has not been dead for thirty years as her father, who refused to speak of her mother, maintained.  What's more the lawyer says Crane has only recently died and he needs to speak to Hallie regarding her mother's will.  Hallie finds that not only did her mother, Annie, not die in a house fire three decades ago, but that wasn't even her name--and Hallie and her father have been living under assumed names all these years.  Unfortunately her father's unable to shed light on why he fled the island all those years ago and faked their deaths because he's deep in the weeds of early onset Alzheimer's.

Upon her return to the island in blustery November, Hallie finds a close knit, insular, suspicious community and an isolated, long extinct way of life.  From the moment she sets foot on the island, Hallie sees visions and strange things happen to her.  Can Hallie see ghosts and visions of the past?  Is someone playing tricks on her?  Or is she going mad?

Hallie is immediately confronted by the cloud of mystery and suffering that hangs over the island due to the thirty year old unsolved murder of one of Hallie's childhood girlfriends in which her father was heavily implicated.  She decides that for her to live peacefully on the island, she needs to get to the bottom of the mystery in order to clear her father's name.  Meanwhile, Iris, the ancient and creepy housekeeper who kept house and history for Hallie's mother's family tells Hallie the spooky, odd, and tragic tale of her great-grandparents, her grandfather and Hallie's own tale--the tale of Halycon Crane.

In general this is a well-drawn story.  There are places the writing is a bit sappy with its turn of phrase, while in others it rises above this to show the author's potential.  Ghost story lovers who appreciate a splash of romance with the spooks and scares will love this tale.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In The Woods by Tana French

"What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with the truth is fundamental, but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies ... and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely ... This is my job ... What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this--two things: I crave truth. And I lie." opening lines of In The Woods chapter 1, pages 3-4 In The Woods by Tana French, an Irish writer, is an extremely well-written and well-crafted mystery novel. The downside is that this is French's debut novel, and her website (located at http://www.tanafrench.com/ ) does not off...
24 comments
Read more

Broken by Karin Slaughter

Before I begin the formal review there are a few things I need to get off my chest in the wake of finishing this book; I'll do so without giving away too many (or any) spoilers. The OUTRAGE!: the identity of Detective Lena Adams' new beau; the low depths to which Grant County's interim chief has sunk and brought the police force down with him; agent Will Trent's wife, Angie's, sixth sense/nasty habit of reappearing in his life just when he's slipping away from her. Thank God for small miracles though because while Angie was certainly referred to during the book, the broad didn't make an appearance. One sign that I've become way too invested in these characters is that I'd like to employ John Connolly's odd pair of assassins, Louis and Angel, to contract out a hit on Angie; do you think Karin Slaughter and John Connolly could work out a special cross over? Hallelujah: Dr. Sara Linton and agent Will Trent are both back. There is no hallelujah fo...
3 comments
Read more

Generation Kill by Evan Wright and One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick

Non-fiction books aren't really my thing; generally, this is how my relationship goes with non-fiction books: I see a really interesting one, I borrow it, I start to read it, and then I ditch it a chapter or two later when the dry, boring writing and non-existent plot fail to hook me. However, this a review of two non-fiction books that I read back to back after a five year old three article series that I dug up on the internet; it was written by Evan Wright and preceded his book Generation Kill , which is basically a book version of the article series that he wrote and published in Rolling Stone Magazine . Recently HBO adapted Generation Kill into a mini-series that ran sometime last year; I got the series on DVD and in the midst of watching it, I decided I wanted to get my hands on the book to read. In the meantime, I stumbled across One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the lieutenant of the platoon that Wright embedded with, and I read that book while I waited for Generation K...
1 comment
Read more