Review: GhostHeart

Annie O'Neill is 30, single, and lonely in the teeming metropolis of NYC. Safely hidden behind the shelves in her used bookstore, Annie watches the world go past her windows without her. With both of her parents long dead, Annie has no relatives or relationships to pull her outside of her sheltered life and her only neighbor is almost as much of a recluse as she is. But Sullivan [while serving as a father figure] HAS been out and seen much of the world. An alcoholic ex-reporter, he has lived life through the eyes of a foreign correspondent and has made choices he regrets - one of them the lack of a significant other. He continues to encourage Annie to join the world and makes her a promise that changes both their lives.

One day, a stranger walks into her life. A man who says he knew her father. He tempts Annie to continue a tradition of book study one night/week in her shop - this time, with just the two of them. His carrots are the letters his father wrote to her mother that were never delivered a glimpse of the father she cannot remember. The book he brings her is an unfinished manuscript by someone he used to know - but he only gives Annie a few pages at a time to read, with the promise of more to come.

At the same time, spurred by the needling from her neighbor, Sullivan, Annie begins a relationship with a man she barely knows and falls head over heels. She hardly recognizes herself, as she throws herself into her relationship with David and causes Sullivan to change his own life.

The mystery in this second novel from Roger Jon Ellory is very subtle, but it nags at the reader until the pieces begin falling into place. How important is family? Your past? Your heritage? Does it really MATTER who/what your parents were? Your grandparents? Annie must deal with all of these questions when she realizes she knows the answers to none of them and her safe, predictable world is dumped upside down, shaken and stirred, never to be the same again. Engrossing, with a slightly cliched final tie-up, get to know Annie, her ghosts and all.

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Book Review: GhostHeart