A review lightly sprinkled with spoilers about bestselling author Rachel Hawkins’s newest mystery thriller
Hello and welcome to yet another book review by yours truly! I apologize for missing last week; Spring Break may be a nice break for the kiddos, but sadly not for us grownups! Because of this, I took a week off from the blog. But I’m back with a new book I read for my local book club. I meet up with a local book club at least once a month, and I love it to death. It’s a new book every week, but I can usually only do one per month. For the month of March I chose to read “The Heiress” by Rachel Hawkins. I’ve seen this author’s name around a lot and knew she wrote popular mystery thrillers, but I’ve never read one of her books until now.
Let me do a quick synopsis: “The Heiress” is a story told throughout two timelines: one in the present with Camden McTavish and his wife Jules Brewster, and one in the past with the heiress herself, Mrs. Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore. I wish I was kidding with that name. Mrs. Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore died ten years before the start of this book at the age of 73. (And no, it was not from exhaustion from toting all those names around all day every day.) The reason for the long name is because she has taken on the surname of all four of her husbands – husbands who have all died under mysterious circumstances. After her death, she bequeathed her entire fortune and estate to her adopted son, Camden. Unfortunately, he wants nothing to do with it.
However, years after the heiress’s passing, Camden’s uncle dies suddenly, and he and his wife Jules are brought back to Ashby House, the estate Camden owns but wants no part of. Here he reunites with his super duper friendly family (feel the sarcasm?) and all the memories that caused him to flee the mansion when he was a young man. Now that everyone’s under the same roof, secrets are revealed, lives are changed, and nothing will ever be the same.
My star rating: I gave this book a solid 3 out of 5.
I do like the thriller/mystery genre, but I tend to not read a lot of this specific kind. You know the type: the Rachel Hawkins, the Lucy Foley, the Ruth Ware, the Lisa Jewell. In fact, I’ve only read one Lisa Jewell novel and it was the September 2023 pick for the same book club. So I guess you can say I’ll read it if it’s offered, but I won’t seek it out on my own.
With that being said – with me saying, “I tend to not read these specific novels…” – I sure as heck figured out almost every plot twist real quick. It kind of has to be like that, yeah? In a book like this, everyone has to be up to something, even the people who you think are the protagonists that stuff just happens to, and there’s no way they bring things upon themselves.
This was a quick and enjoyable read overall. I devoured it and it kept me engaged, but I sure did head-scratch a lot, and it wasn’t because I had no idea what was going on. It was almost like I was confused by how much I did know what was going on. However, the book did have one thing going for it; while the twists overall were pretty generic, there were some extra bits that gave them some originality, so it was easy for me to shrug it off. No, I’m not the type of reader that’s going to be like, “Well, I figured it all out before the end, therefore the book was trash because I didn’t get stumped.” Like I said, I did enjoy it.
The book has three ways of telling the story. One, in the POV of Camden McTavish. Two, in the POV of his wife, Jules Brewster. And three, in the POV of the late Mrs. Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore (I’ll stop calling her by her full name after this, I promise) through letters she wrote shortly before her death, chronicling her life and the four husbands she had along the way. This is what I enjoyed; while the POV of Jules was basically pointless until much later in the story, I liked the choice to have Ruby’s voice come through in her own words like that. I could feel her personality better than if the story was told in first person POV like Cam and Jules. I liked Ruby’s cheekiness, especially when she talks about the husbands she doesn’t quite care for. “He existed, I married him, some stuff happened, then he was dead. Next.”
The pacing overall was also nice. This story could’ve been told in less than 300 pages and – thankfully – it was. No need to drag it on, otherwise it would become a caricature of itself. I did not, however, like the pacing of the ending. To me it felt like a big info dump and I don’t know if it was because I finished it in my bed at 11 o’clock at night or what, but I had to back up a bit and re-read some paragraphs because I was like “huh?” on some things. There was also a plot twist near the end that I almost didn’t quite get because I felt like it wasn’t explained very well, and it wasn’t until a bit later in the chapter where I finally got two and two and they finally snapped together. See, this was one of the plot twists that I figured out overall, but the author added a little twist on top of the twist where it added a bit more to the story; but because of this, there was a lot of info needed at the end to make it all come together in a neat little bow. Did it come together? I’d say it did, but not as neatly as I’d like.
Some Big Bummers: I thought there would be more to the house itself than there was, which was… nothing. I’m not saying it needs to be full-on haunted with the ghosts of Ruby or McTavishes past, but the dust jacket kind of implied something with the house. “As Ashby House tightens its grip on Jules and Camden…” I mean, what else am I supposed to get from that? Sure, it was a metaphor, but my mind went straight to the house will drive them all mad vibes. Having a kind of “gothic” feel to the house would’ve been cool, but in the end it was just a house. Well, a giant 20,000 square foot mansion, but still.
Also, there is some talk about missing hikers throughout the book and it was never resolved or brought up again. The Ashby House sits on top of a mountain basically, and there are some scary hiking trails scattered throughout. Hikers in the past are known to have fallen and died near there, and during the story there were two hikers currently missing. Was this brought up for thematic reasons? That the Ashby House and the surrounding town were basically cursed and evil because of this family? The town is dying, hikers are going missing, and everyone in that damn Ashby House only seems to care about the money Cam currently has control over. Yikes.
Also, when it came to the reveals: they weren’t traditional reveals where the characters are chugging along and they figure something out, or find something or what have you, like in traditional mystery novels. No, most – if not all – of the reveals were already known, and were then revealed to others when the specific character who knew wanted it to be revealed. It was almost comical how it would go down.
“I have a secret.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yes, and it’s a big one and you should be worried.”
“Is it [INSERT SECRET HERE]?”
“Wait, how did you know?”
“I was told like 15 years ago lol.”
“WTF.”
Or it would go down the good ol’ “unreliable narrator” route and have a character ask all these questions throughout the book, only to find out the big twist and then have the reader think back like, “Wait, then why did you ask all those questions if you already freakin’ knew?” As you can see, I’m not a huge fan of the “unreliable narrator” trope. “The Girl on the Train” ruined that for me, ruined it! Oh man, was I seething after that book…
I’ll stop there, because if I keep going I’ll just go on about the spoilers. And while I have a lot of feelings about the spoilers, I’ll just have to save them for my book club this week since I’m doing my best to not spoil every single book I review. Haha!
Have you read “The Heiress”? Loved it? Have thoughts and feelings on the matter? How do you feel about “unreliable narrators” and the like? Let me know down in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you.
Until next time, my lovelies!
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