Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Haunting of Maddy Clare

The Haunting of Maddy Clare
perryfran avatar reviewed on + 1223 more book reviews


I thought this was a pretty good ghost story that kept my attention throughout. The narrator and protagonist of the novel is Sarah Piper, a lonely young woman who works for a temporary agency to work periodically doing various clerical work. Then she is sent on an interview to assist a ghost hunter, Alistair Gellis, who is obsessed by ghosts after seeing one early in life. The novel takes place in the early 1920s, not long after WWI. Gellis was wounded in the war and still has vivid flashbacks to it. His normal assistant, Matthew Ryder, was also in the war and has much deeper scars from it. Sarah is hired by Alistair because Matthew is temporarily occupied elsewhere and because the ghost he is going to investigate, Maddy Clare, hated men in life and will not speak to them in death. Soon Sarah is caught up in the wrath of Maddy who's very angry and seems to possess unholy powers. So why is Maddy so angry, especially towards men? Sarah soon discovers the reasons and what happened to Maddy and along the way, she also falls in love with Matthew. But will he reciprocate her feelings?

As I said, this was a good ghost story. Although it was pretty straight forward and the mystery of Maddie was not hard to solve, it still provided some good chills. I'm not real keen on romance novels and this one was partly that but overall, I would still mildly recommend it.