This wasn’t a book I planned to read in just two sittings. However, after continuing to tell myself “I’ll take a break after this chapter” and then not taking a break after the chapter, I finished it in a blur of twists and reveals that left me gasping.
Death at Morning House follows Marlowe Wexler, an average teenage girl with a years-long crush on Akilah, her ice cream parlor coworker. But all of Marlowe’s summer plans go sideways when she accidentally sets fire to the cottage she was house-sitting for family friends, which she was not supposed to be using for (literally) hot dates. All in a rush, her almost-girlfriend gets a new job and Marlowe loses hers after falling into a spiral thanks to the guilt over the burned-down cottage. The moping doesn’t last long, however, because one of her teachers gets her a job working as a tour guide at the famous Morning House, a mansion on an island estate built in the 1920s with a strange and deadly history.
At the estate, Marlowe meets the six other teenagers already working there, and she gets close with some of them while others hide themselves away. She learns all about the eccentric Philip Ralston and his family: the original owners of the estate before it was abandoned. The mansion is huge and mainly used for tours, though Dr. Henson, the professor employing Marlowe and the others to do the tours, lives in it while doing her research on the family. As Marlowe learns more about the estate and the other teens she’s working with, she finds out some things about the boy she’s replacing—things some of her fellow tour guides don’t want her to know. Her curiosity leads her to start investigating, and when someone goes missing, she can’t help but wonder if the cases are connected.
The second storyline follows Clara Ralston in 1932, the eldest of seven Ralston children during the days leading up to the first of many tragic deaths of her whole family, starting with her youngest brother Max, then her own later on the same day. The Ralston family are an intriguing bunch, and I really enjoyed the sections about them and the circumstances leading up to the collapse of their seemingly idyllic lifestyle. Their family is tight-knit, but dysfunctional in many ways, especially as Philip tries to mold his children’s views to match how he sees the world, including educating them on the “science” of eugenics. He sets tight schedules, prescribes strange diets, and forbids alcohol and sugar, so it’s no surprise that Clara and some of her siblings chafe against their father’s orders.
We learn early on who else in the Ralston family dies, the order of their deaths, and how. It’s all part of the Morning House tour. This knowledge makes it all the more interesting to find out exactly how the deaths came to be. They were written off in the news reports and history books as accidental or simply bad fortune. But were they really chance, or was foul play involved?
My absolute favourite part of any Maureen Johnson mystery is how she weaves together a compelling storyline from both the past and the present that parallel each other in multiple ways. The Morning House tour guides are a group of six friends, and one newcomer to them all (Marlowe). There were six adopted children in the Ralston family, plus Max, the odd one out as the only biological son. I thought this made really interesting dynamics between characters, and tied each period together despite two entirely different mysteries occurring in them.
As I said, I ate this up and barely even stopped to ponder who might have done it, so the ending was a thrilling rush of revelations and plot twists that made sense even though I didn’t predict them. While it’s got all the hallmarks of a good thriller—a missing person, general skulduggery, and many horrible deaths—the ending is sweet, to put a cherry on top of this captivating tale of extremely messy families, friendships, and friend-group love polygons. If you’re looking for a book to tie together the end of summer with the arrival of spooky season, give Death at Morning House a read!
