{"id":1052,"date":"2013-06-26T15:44:50","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T21:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1052"},"modified":"2013-06-26T15:44:50","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T21:44:50","slug":"simone-st-james-an-inquiry-into-love-and-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/simone-st-james-an-inquiry-into-love-and-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Simone St. James: An Inquiry into Love and Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is a fun mix of romance, mystery and a cracking good ghost story.\u00a0 I enjoyed the fact that the author unabashedly buys into the whole ghost paradigm \u2013 there\u2019s not an ounce of irony here, which serves to make her ghost far more scary. Set just after WWI, the main character is a young woman at Somerville College, Oxford, part of an illustrious group of women who were the first to get a university education at Oxford.\u00a0 In real life their numbers included Dorothy L. Sayers and Vera Brittain, author of the classic memoir of WWI, Testament of Youth.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"inquiryinto\"<\/a>Jillian Leigh is a student at Oxford in 1924, so she would have been slightly younger than Sayers and Brittain.\u00a0 While she isn\u2019t as personally wounded by the war, she\u2019s constantly encountering people who have been affected by it in all kinds of ways.\u00a0 It\u2019s an interesting choice on the part of the author.\u00a0 Instead of immersing her character in the war, like Jacqueline Winspear\u2019s Maisie Dobbs, Jillian\u2019s very life fabric has been altered by the fact of it.\u00a0 It\u2019s the only world she knows, unlike Sayers, Brittain, or the fictional Maisie, for whom there was a \u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cafter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jillian thus enters the world at a more cynical and jaded level (for 1924, anyway), and it seems to have made her emotionally resilient and capable, despite the large number of curve balls thrown her way, starting with the accidental death of her uncle Toby in a remote village named Rothewell.\u00a0 Jillian\u2019s parents are in Paris, so she has to leave school and identify the body and pack up her uncle\u2019s things in his rental cottage.\u00a0 She also has to drive \u2013 gasp \u2013 a motorcar.\u00a0 Both things, the fact of her car and<\/i> her university education make her, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a freak.<\/p>\n

Her freak flag is flying her first morning in the cottage as she\u2019s forced to greet both her uncle\u2019s landlady and a dashing Scotland Yard inspector in only<\/i> a shirtwaist dress and a man\u2019s cardigan \u2013 with no shoes or stockings.\u00a0 It\u2019s her study outfit as she\u2019d thought she\u2019d be undisturbed, but she\u2019s instead forced not only to make tea and conversation but to reveal her uncle\u2019s secret \u2013 he was a ghost hunter, with very professional type tools.\u00a0 As it turns out neither Jillian or Inspector Merriken thinks her uncle\u2019s death was an accident or a suicide, they are sure it was murder.<\/p>\n

This is a mystery novel, so that part really isn\u2019t too surprising, nor is the somewhat predictable romance between Jillian and the Inspector.\u00a0 What is distinct and original about this novel is the setting \u2013 a tiny village on the British coast \u2013 and the details of the local ghost, Walking John.\u00a0 The story behind him is definitely creepy.<\/p>\n

St. James also adds a little spy and suspense element to her story, allowing her to give the book the kind of slam bang finish that will stay in your mind for awhile after you finish it.\u00a0 I liked Jillian and the cat that adopts her.\u00a0 I liked her dashing detective, and the fact that she stands up for herself, and I liked the folklore elements that go along with ghost hunting.\u00a0 This story could have been a bit tighter, but all in all a very enjoyable and unusual read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a fun mix of romance, mystery and a cracking good ghost story.\u00a0 I enjoyed the fact that the author unabashedly buys into the whole ghost paradigm \u2013 there\u2019s not an ounce of irony here, which serves to make her ghost far more scary. Set just after WWI, the main character is a young … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-historical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1054,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions\/1054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}