When Gloria Sutter, a glamorous spirit medium, is brutally murdered at a seance site, Ellie Winter, her sometime friend and rival, is drawn into a web of mystery and betrayal. As Gloria’s acquaintances end up dead or missing, Ellie fears that she may be the next target of a killer intent on snuffing out London’s psychics — but for what purpose?
The Other Side of Midnight is the last (so far?) of Simone St. James’ inter-war romantic suspense novels, and it revisits many of the themes she started exploring in The Haunting of Maddy Clare: the psychic trauma of war, restless spirits with unfinished business, and plucky young heroines living in the transition from the Edwardian to the modern age. I’ve heard her call these her “Mary Stewart” books, and it’s a fitting description: her heroines are resourceful and clever, there are suspenseful chases, and the male love interests are brooding men with dark pasts who nonetheless are willing to let the women make bold and often daring choices. There’s also a good deal of interesting history woven in, in this case about the rise of spirit mediums after the First World War and some of the wartime and post-war espionage that blurred the lines of friend and foe.
It occurs to me that I’ve only got two more Simone St. James books on my TBR — The Sundown Motel and Murder Road — and I’m debating whether I should dive right into them or hold them back as a treat for the dark nights of fall and winter.
