(originally posted on December 20, 2008)
As much as I adored THE MEANING OF NIGHT, Cox's followup, set roughly twenty years later, even better represents the kind of old-fashioned read longed for but hardly written these days. Take a young, long-orphaned woman with a secret mission, place her as a servant in the house of a middle-aged woman with many overt and covert demons to exorcise, add layers of intrigue and betrayal and a spooky house, and voila: a Victorian pastiche that begs to be read on a cold winter's night by candlelight and sipping hot chocolate to boot. This is a book to be lost in and happily never find your way out.
