"The House on Foster Hill" by Jaime Jo Wright - dual timelines with dual suspense

When her husband died two years earlier, Kaine Prescott's pleas to have the suspicious death investigated further came to nothing. In an effort to start a new life, she buys a house across the country sight-unseen--and regrets it the moment she sets eyes on the eerie, long-abandoned house. It doesn't take long before she learns snippets of the house's dark history--a history that comes to haunt her. A century earlier, a young woman is found dead on the property, and Ivy Thorpe, daughter of the town doctor and medical examiner, seems to be the only one who cares who the woman was. With the help of a man from her past, she begins investigating the woman's death, but will it mean her own?

Dual timelines can really be hit or miss with me, especially if one timeline is noticeably slower or less interesting than the other. However, this one is really well done. With how complex the story is and how interwoven the plots are, I can't imagine being the author and charting it all out, but it's perfectly balanced, with equally intense story lines. And unlike some other dual timeline books, the two timelines in this one have not just the same setting, but the same tone--somewhat dark and ominous--which helps the story flow. Others I've read have been rather jolting when switching from one timeline to the other, but these fit together really well.

I'm glad that there wasn't a specific timeline that I liked significantly more than the other; both women had their issues, but both were easy to root for. Ivy is a very nontraditional heroine, being somewhat obsessed with--not so much death, as the lives that the dead had lived. She helps her father with postmortems without cringing, a highly unusual activity for a girl in 1900, and that alone makes her stand out. Kaine was easier to relate to, being a modern woman near my age. But more importantly, her profession, her passion, the thing that makes her herself--her ability to help women out of cycles of abuse--is turned on its head when she finds herself in the same position as those she's helped. She recognizes it, and intellectually she knows all the steps, yet she isn't able to fix herself. While I've never known abuse like that, there have been times when I intellectually know all the right steps to get out of my problem yet can't seem to implement them without outside help--an opportunity for God to reveal His strength through my weakness.

Given the subject matter, this is a fairly dark book, especially for Christian fiction, yet it is surprisingly faith-filled, and it offers significant hope even in the most horrific of circumstances. I really enjoyed it; it's fast-paced, intense, full of suspense, and takes a number of surprising turns. And it is the winner of the 2018 Christy Award for Mystery/Suspense/Thriller!

Thank you Bethany House and NetGalley for the free e-book. I was not required to write a positive review, and all opinions are my own.