I’m never quite sure how to describe Louise Douglas’ books. Set in either the present day or recent past, they are not exactly mysteries or crime novels, but more than just romances, and although they do have ghostly or gothic elements, they are grounded in the reality of family drama and personal tragedy. Probably romantic suspense is the best term for them, I think. Having enjoyed three of them – The Secrets Between Us, In Her Shadow and Your Beautiful Lies – I was hoping that I would also enjoy her new one, The House by the Sea.

Our narrator, Edie, has spent the last ten years blaming her former mother-in-law, Anna DeLuca, for the death of her little boy, Daniel, and the breakdown of her marriage that followed. When she hears that Anna has died she feels a sense of relief, but she is less pleased to learn that Anna has left her Sicilian villa to Edie and her ex-husband, Joe. Convinced that this is just an attempt to reunite her with Joe, Edie is angry with Anna for continuing to meddle in her life even from beyond the grave, so she heads for Sicily determined to find a buyer for the villa and return home again as quickly as possible.

On her arrival in Sicily, Edie has to endure an awkward meeting with Joe, who has also come to inspect his inheritance and look for a buyer. However, Edie soon finds herself falling in love with the crumbling old villa and is intrigued by the many secrets it seems to be hiding. Where is the valuable painting of the Madonna del Mare, missing from its place on the wall? Who are the two girls in Anna’s childhood photographs and why does one of them have her face scratched out? And what is the reason for all the bad luck Edie and Joe begin to experience? Is someone trying to drive them away from Sicily before they can uncover the truth?

Louise Douglas writes beautifully; she is one of those authors with a real talent for capturing the mood and atmosphere of a place, whether that place is the Yorkshire Moors (Your Beautiful Lies), the Cornish coast (In Her Shadow) or a rural village in Somerset (The Secrets Between Us). The House by the Sea is the first of her books that I’ve read which is set outside England and I loved the vivid descriptions of Sicily, beginning with Edie’s first sight of the island – probably the most travelling I’ll do this year!

The aircraft tipped to begin its descent and through the porthole I watched the southern side of the island of Sicily emerge from the glare of the sun. Beyond the breaching wing lay a hazy, mountainous land surrounded by turquoise water. Wispy clouds bunched around the summit of Etna, the shadow of a forest creeping up her flank. I saw the sprawl of cities, the pencil line of motorways, the meandering loops of a river and the brilliant blue rectangle of a reservoir. My journey was almost over and Joe was somewhere down there, waiting for me.

The mystery element of the novel is not very strong, to be honest. I found it easy to guess who was behind the strange occurrences at the villa – although I didn’t know exactly why and had to wait until the end of the book for everything to be explained. But what I did enjoy was watching Edie’s development as a character as, under the warm Sicilian sun, she begins to come to terms with what happened all those years ago and slowly finds the strength to move on. Her relationship with Joe and the way it changes over the course of the novel is well written and feels believable, but again, it was too easy to predict what was going to happen!

This is not one of my favourites by Louise Douglas, but it did remind me of how much I enjoyed reading her books a few years ago. I seem to have missed her last book, The Secret by the Lake, which was published in 2015, so I will have to catch up with that one soon.

Thanks to Boldwood Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.