The Silent Companions

Name: The Silent Companions
Rating: 3.88 (57460 reviews)

by Laura Purcell Book 2 in the Silent Companions series.

First published 2017

Amazon

3.9(57,460)

In 1865, newly widowed Elsie Bainbridge arrives at The Bridge, her late husband's decaying country estate, to spend her pregnancy away from London. The hostile village and uneasy servants are troubling enough, but a locked room contains a centuries-old diary and a painted wooden figure that looks disturbingly like Elsie. Soon the silent companion seems less like an ornament than a presence watching the household.

A second narrative reaches back to 1635, when the Bainbridge family prepared The Bridge for a royal visit and first encountered the strange wooden figures. Purcell uses the two periods to build a gothic history of inheritance, suspicion and female vulnerability, leaving open the question of how much of the terror is supernatural and how much is produced by fear, trauma and the stories families choose to preserve.