I've just begun Kate Morton's The Distant Hours, and it's a promising start of the 'missing letter/decaying country house/eccentric sisters' type. Our heroine has happened upon Milderhurst Castle, home to the elderly Blythe sisters whose father Raymond wrote the children's gothic classic The True History of the Mud Man which sparked Edie's love of books and her career in publishing. The castle is the place to which Edie's mother was evacuated during the war, and one of its occupants wrote a letter to her in those days, a letter which has just turned up, discovered - undelivered - in an attic after fifty years. Edie is about to visit Milderhurst, but what will she find there?
I'm looking forward to reading on, and this is the first Kate Morton for me - despite the enormous success of her earlier novels The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden
(that title alone is enough to get my attention, and those covers with the gates, well....!) I haven't read them. Have you?