Book Review: The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Title: The Distant Hours
Author: Kate Morton
Enjoyment Rating: *****
This book would be rated: PG or PG-13 for adult themes
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 119

I read Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden a few years ago, and although I vaguely remember enjoying it, I hardly remember it at all. I must have read it when I was feeling preoccupied about something else. Anyway, my friend Michelle was talking about Morton on one of our early-morning runs, and I decided to download The Distant Hours, mostly because I switched my Audible subscription from two books a month to one, so I've been buying long books lately (in the past, I used to buy short books, because I could finish them quicker, therefore boosting the number of books I read in a year, but that is a subject for another post).  Anyway, I started listening to The Distant Hours and at first, I wasn't sold. Although I know that Morton is an author living in Australia and writing about England, it bugged me that the narrator, Caroline Lee, had a decidedly Australian sound to her voice when she was reading about an English story (Lee is a wonderful, gifted reader, by the way, but as an American, that inconsistency felt jarring).

Like many of Morton's stories, The Distant Hours has a modern-day protagonist who sets out to discovery a mystery from the past. In this case, Edie Burchell is an editor living in London who has a difficult relationship with her mother, Meredith. Edie discovers that her working-class mother was sent from London during the Blitz to live at Milderhurst Castle, which was inhabited by three sisters, Percy, Seraphina, and Juniper. When Edie gets lost in the countryside and finds herself at the castle, she starts to look into her mother's past, which leads her back to a Gothic murder-mystery that has overshadowed life at the castle for more than fifty years. It's a lovely book with many layers of story, and Morton is a natural storyteller--she knows just when to break away from the 1941 story to the 1991 story, always leaving readers wanting more.