Laura DiSilverio--Tara, Manderley and . . . the Chateau du Cygne Noir?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: If we are celebrating the advent of fall, what better way to do it than to curl up with a good book? Not just any book, but the kind of suspense novel that got many of us reading, thrilling and enchanting us with a creepy setting, suspicious characters, and a heroine whose life might depend on figuring out the mystery just in time.

Well, you can make your cup of hot chocolate (or pumpkin latte) and enjoy THAT LAST WEEKEND, the brand new novel from our Jungle Red friend Laura DiSilverio! Laura gives us all of the above, plus not just one protagonist but four, searching for a murderer in the melancholy Chateau du Cygne Noir. 

AND Laura is giving away a copy to one of our commenters!

Every year for a decade, five college friends spent a weekend together at the atmospheric Chateau du Cygne Noir. Then, tragedy struck.
 

Ten years later, Laurel Muir returns to the castle for the first time since the accident, hoping to reconnect with her friends and lay the past to rest. When a murderer strikes, it rips open old wounds and forces the women to admit there's a killer in their midst. The remaining friends make a pact to unearth the truth, but suspicion, doubt, and old secrets threaten to tear them apart. Unsure who to trust, Laurel puts herself in harm's way, risking it all for friendship and long-delayed justice.

Just reading this gives me goosebumps. Laura, tell us more.

    

LAURA DISILVERIO:  In my high school years and early twenties, I devoured gothic novels where young governesses or secretaries accepted positions at moody mansions in remote locales and stumbled into secrets and dire peril. Murder, sinister retainers, ghosts and brooding men were staples of these books. I loved Daphne duMaurier, Dorothy Eden, Joan Aiken, Mary Stewart . . . I could go on and on. Gothic novels seem to have fallen out of favor, alas, but I have borrowed some elements for my latest release, THAT LAST WEEKEND, including the atmospheric old house.

           In THAT LAST WEEKEND, the house is the Chateau du Cygne Noir (Castle of the Black Swan), a French chateau relocated stone-by-stone from the Loire Valley to North Carolina where it's now a B&B. My protagonist, Laurel Muir, and her friends spent a girls weekend there every year for a decade, starting with spring breaks when they were in college. A tragedy occurs during that last weekend, and they don't assemble at the castle again for another ten years. I describe the chateau from several points of view, because it affects each character differently. Here is Geneva Frost's take on it:

            The Chateau du Cygne Noir bed and breakfast sign appeared suddenly. It featured elegant white script on a lavender background with a black swan. Wide stone pillars on either side of the driveway supported the decorative iron gate that was always open, and she turned in gingerly. The driveway’s sharp curves hid the castle until she came around the last bend and it burst into view. Its warm yellow stone seemed to soak up the sunlight and beam it back. Arched windows with their numerous small panes glinted. She’d loved the place the moment she set eyes on it that first spring break, almost as much as Vangie did. It had presence, a personality, the way the House of Usher or Manderley did. She knew Dawn would say “your English major is showing” if she shared her thoughts. The house wasn’t brooding, like Usher’s house, nor was it grand and forbidding like Rebecca’s Manderley, its stony façade repelling the nameless heroine. If Geneva were to assign an emotion to the chateau, she’d have to go with sad. No … melancholy. The stalwart home that should have been surrounded by fields of lavender and wine grapes, that had presided over the siege of Tournai and absorbed the blood of its scion on the cobbled courtyard and the screams of maidservants treated the way ill-disciplined armies treated women, felt displaced in this verdant corner of the New World. 

        Although THAT LAST WEEKEND is very much a modern suspense novel with four women in their late thirties trying to identify a murderer and reclaim a friendship that an old tragedy derailed, it's also an homage to the classic gothics, complete with sinister retainers (modernized as the B&B's managers) and the ghost of a young countess flung out of a window to her death. (Defenestration--I love that word!) It comes out this Friday, September 8th, and you can pre-order your copy right here. (Please.) 

         Did you read gothic novels? What were your faves? What houses/castles/mansions do you remember from books you've read? Do you ever think of the setting as a character in the novel?

        I'll be here to chat with you all day, and one lucky commenter will get a free copy of THAT LAST WEEKEND!

       

 Laura DiSilverio is the bestselling and award-winning author of 21 novels, including multiple mystery series and standalone suspense novels, and a Young Adult dystopian trilogy. She lives in Colorado where she is trying (with lots of home projects and Haagen Dazs) to come to terms with being an empty nester. 

DEBS: It seems to me that the gothic suspense novel is making a comeback, which couldn't make me happier. So interested to hear who else loved books like this.

Name That House

DEBORAH CROMBIE A good friend recently bought her first house.  It has beautiful, majestic oaks in the back garden, and she had been searching for a place that felt like a safe refuge, so after some thought she has named her house Oak Haven.

And then it occurred to me that although I'm accustomed to houses in England having names, we've lived in our wonderful house for almost twenty years and we've never named it. I think houses should have names if they are well-loved and well-lived in, but what?? (That's our house on the right.) Our house was known for many years in our town as The Green House, because the people who lived in it for decades (although they were not the first owners) were named Green.  But the house is not green, and Greens no longer live in it. We could call it The Wilson House (my hubby's name), but his grandparents' house (now owned by his cousin, also a Wilson) rightfully deserves that moniker.

I don't really like "bungalow", although our 1905 house is early Arts and Crafts. It's too big for a "cottage."  So what is unique about it, I've been asking myself. The perennial garden is lovely, but I'm not calling it "Rose Cottage!" We have huge elm trees, and an enormous pecan. The back garden is a veritable glade, but "glade" brings to mind air-freshener these days. Sigh. We have hummingbirds, and songbirds galore, especially cardinals, always my favorite bird. But "Cardinal House" makes me think of the Vatican...

And then of course there are the two dogs and the (now) three cats... Oh, and the koi in the pond!  And the over-abundance of squirrels in the trees... But I'm not calling it The Pound (although Squirrel Run would certainly fit my usual state of mind...)

And there is, of course, a writer-in-residence...

So, fellow REDS, do your homes have names? If not, should they? And what would you call them?


RHYS BOWEN:  It's funny you should mention this, because we always lived in houses with names in England. I grew up in a house whose entire address was Britomart, Swanley, Kent.  An old sea captain built it in the early 19th century and named it after the ship, the HMS Britomart. He also built it in the shape of a sailing ship, so it was long and thin with corridors great for roller skating down. And the garden was full of exotic plants he had brought back from around the world.

But I've never thought of naming a house here. We've lived in our current one for thirty years, but I can't say it has much personality. It's big and functional but it's only real selling point is the view. So maybe Hilltop House, but then the rest of our street has a similar view. The English House? because everyone knows we are English. Sometimes I'd like to call it Wit's End......

LUCY BURDETTE: Oh Rhys, I love Wit's End! We never had house names either, though we referred to houses by the address. The Sutton Drive house for example, where my sister and I are posing as forsythia branches. Or just plain Horseshoe Drive. I think in New England, it's more of either a vacation house thing (The Kabejz Patch is down the road from us) or something historical (as in the Deacon Grave house.)

Now that I think of it, I've never named a car either. I was stunned a couple of years ago when my stepson referred to his car as "Pablo."

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I love the British custom of naming houses, and I wish we had it here. It's enriched fiction as well - where would English literature be without The Burrow, Bag End, Brideshead and Bleak House? And those are just the Bs!
 
Lucy's right about vacation homes in New England. If you walk down a beach-side road in any coastal town, you'll see the names hanging over the porches and painted on mailboxes: "Bide-a-Wee" "Blueberry Cottage" "Sandy Toes" and "Time Away." It's always the small friendly shabby ones, too, the houses dating from a time when ordinary folks could buy a place on or near the water. Gradually, they're being bought and torn down and replaced by three-story McMansions squeezed onto the tiny lots - and those houses never have names.

If I were to name our house, I would call it Scribbler's Hill, as we are at the highest elevation of our road above the Saco River and, of course, because a writer lives here. We actually have a named house across the river in Hollis; Quillcote, (below) long-time home of Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Old Peabody

Pew.

DEBS: Rhys, I adore Wit's End. I may have to steal it from you! And Julia, you are so right about house names in fiction. I can think of dozens more, but just have to add Dove Cottage, home of Wordsworth's sister Dorothy in the English Lake District. While not fictional, it has wonderful writerly associations. Or Virginia Woolf's Monk's House.

Or what about Manderley? Or Tara? Would those books be the same without the house names?  And how can we not mention Downton Abbey!

So while I think I'll pass on Kabejz Patch, let's use some imagination on our neglected American homes--starting with mine! Give us a name, please, readers!

PS: Lucy, you and your sister were absolutely adorable! And Rhys, the house you grew up in sounds like something out of a story--has it crept into any of your books?