I binged some Simone St. James in the spring of 2025, starting with “An Inquiry Into Love and Death.” “The Haunting of Maddy Clare” was my second Simone St. James book, and I enjoyed it as much as, and even a little more than, the first.
Sarah Piper is living hand-to-mouth in 1920s London, taking temporary office jobs to keep her threadbare bedsit. She’s offered an unusual job, assisting a ghost hunter trying to document and possibly exorcise an especially frightening haunting, and she enters into her new role with more than a little wariness. When she does encounter the ghost of Maddy Clare, a young servant girl of unknown origin who hanged herself in the now-haunted barn, Sarah is terrified, but also determined to solve the mystery behind the haunting.
Like “An Inquiry Into Love and Death,” “The Haunting of Maddy Clare” has World War I firmly in its background. Both the ghost hunter, Alistair Gellis, and his assistant, Matthew Ryder, were scarred both mentally and physically by the war; and the war’s social upheaval has extended to the village as well.
The violence and rage at the heart of the haunting, though, is far more personal and intimate, and Maddy Clare is one of the most terrifying ghosts I’ve encountered in a book, driven by vengeful fury. This was a much more intense read than “An Inquiry Into Love and Death,” and much more frightening as well.
