The Winters
By Lisa Gabriele
Blurb
After a whirlwind romance, a young woman returns to the opulent, secluded mansion of her new fiancé Max Winter - a wealthy senator and recent widower - and a life of luxury she’s never known. But all is not as it appears at the Asherley estate. The house is steeped in the memory of Max’s beautiful first wife Rebekah, who haunts the young woman’s imagination and feeds her uncertainties, while his very alive teenage daughter Dani makes her life a living hell.
As the soon-to-be second Mrs. Winter grows more in love with Max, and more afraid of Dani, she is drawn deeper into the family’s dark secrets - the kind of secrets that could kill her, too.
Our Review
Lisa Gabriele does a good job of reworking Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in her latest book The Winters.
After a whirlwind romance, our narrator becomes engaged to the recently widowed senator Max Winter.
When they meet, she is working to pay off a debt to her tyrannical boss Laureen after she paid the debts surrounding her father’s death. Debts which Laureen likes to use as leverage to get her to do things nobody else wants to do.
On this particular day Max is looking to hire a boat from the company to take out the following day and that is when they meet. After he leaves she is filled in on the tragic death of his wife and the troublesome nature of his daughter Dani.
“The daughter though? Total piece of work. The biggest snotnosed brat ever.”
After a short time, he takes her back to his luxurious home on his private island, but she struggles to adjust to the change in her circumstances when she is used to ferrying people like Max around on fishing trips.
But all is not as it appears at the Asherley estate. She is constantly being bombarded with reminders of Max's first wife Rebekah and his teenage daughter Dani is determined to let her know she isn't welcome.
The soon-to-be second Mrs. Winter gets drawn deeper into the family’s dark secrets and the more she learns the more scared she becomes.
“Never did it occur to me that I would one day meet Dani and come to know her, and that the question of her well-being, her sanity, would be of paramount concern to me, to my happiness, to my very life.”
When I first started reading this, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be my thing as I am not a huge fan of romance and thrillers are a bit tricky for me as I tend to guess what is coming and that isn’t always a good thing. In this case I did guess some of the major twists, but I don’t think it detracted from the novel.
The Winters was atmospheric and gripping from the first few lines:
“Last night Rebekah tried to murder me again. It had been a while since I had that dream, not since we left Asherly, a place I called home for one Winter and the bittersweet part of Spring, the dream only ever recurring when Max was gone and I’d find myself alone with Dani.”
The Winters was an enjoyable read.
Our Final Rating...
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