Picking Up the Threads

This title in Hippo's 'Hauntings' series begins with the familiar theme of a child farmed out to a relative while her parents indulge themselves abroad. Nicky is sent to stay with an octogenarian recluse in a decaying house haunted by the cries of a drowned child. Her courageous investigations reveal a murder, annd inspire her demoralised Aunt Sarah to assist in the righting of ancestral wrongs. Several of the joints in the plot creak as loudly as the floorboards of the haunted house, but these faults are redeemed by the pace of the narrative and the vividness of the descriptive writing. The book should appeal to fluent readers with a highly developed ability to suspend disbelief.