A Corpse Bride Mystery That Forgot the Mystery

A fake medium walks into a haunted house

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. Genevieve Timmons is a con artist, the kind who fleeces grieving Victorians by pretending to channel their dead relatives. She gets recruited for what should be an easy job: impersonate a famous spiritualist, go to Somerset Park, convince a grieving fiance that his dead bride is trying to reach him from beyond the grave, collect the money, leave. Simple.

Except the estate is actually creepy. The dead bride, Cordelia, apparently really did die under strange circumstances, and pretty quickly Genevieve realizes she might be faking a haunting inside a house that has an actual, unsolved death sitting at the bottom of it. And there’s Captain Alistair Davenport, groundskeeper turned romantic interest, who is suspicious of her from minute one and also, obviously, extremely her type.

I love this setup. A liar has to figure out the truth while maintaining the lie. That’s good bones for a book. The problem is what Myers builds on top of them, which I’ll get into, but I want to be clear that the premise itself is not the issue. The issue is the execution wobbling between gothic mystery and romance without fully committing to either.

Where it earns its atmosphere, and where it loses the thread

Let me give credit where it’s due first. The setting works. Somerset Park is appropriately oppressive, full of locked rooms and unexplained noises and a household staff that all seem to be hiding something, which, fair, they are. There’s a scene early on where Genevieve is setting up one of her fake seance tricks, rigging a table to rattle, and gets genuinely spooked by something she can’t explain, and that moment where the fraud briefly can’t tell if she’s been fraud-ed herself is the book at its best. That’s the tension I wanted for three hundred pages.

Here’s the thing though. The mystery itself doesn’t hold up if you poke it. I found myself, around the two-thirds mark, going back over the clues and realizing some of them only work if I don’t ask too many questions about timeline or motive. A few reveals depend on characters knowing things they shouldn’t reasonably know yet, or on Genevieve suddenly having an insight that isn’t earned by the investigating she’s actually done on the page. I don’t need Agatha Christie level clockwork from a book like this, but I do need to not be doing math against the plot while I’m supposed to be swept up in it.

The romance, meanwhile, takes up a lot of oxygen. Alistair is broody and honorable and there’s a will-they-won’t-they that moves at the pace you’d expect, but it slows the mystery down in the back half exactly when I wanted the investigation to tighten. I kept flipping ahead a little, which I almost never do, just to see if we were getting back to the actual dead girl anytime soon.

Am I being too hard on this. Maybe. I read a lot of gothic romance and I know going in that the mystery is often the vehicle for the romance and not the other way around, and if I judge every book in this genre by locked-room-mystery standards I’m going to end up disappointed by books that were never trying to be that. But the marketing and the opening chapters genuinely sell you on “mystery first,” and then the back half quietly becomes “romance first,” and that bait and switch is what actually annoyed me, not the romance existing at all.

The best con is the one where you almost believe it yourself.

About B.R. Myers

B.R. Myers writes atmospheric, romance-forward historical fiction, and A Dreadful Splendor was her big breakout, the book that got her compared to gothic romance heavyweights and put her on a lot of “books like Bridgerton but spookier” lists. She clearly loves the genre furniture: crumbling estates, grief, secrets in the walls, a heroine who’s smarter than the room. I’d put her in the camp of writers who are still figuring out how tightly to plot the mystery underneath the mood, and I’m curious whether her later work tightens that up, because the raw ingredients here are genuinely good.

If the manor-house vibes hooked you, read these next

• The Diviners by Libba Bray, for occult fakery and real supernatural danger tangled together, done with more narrative control.
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, if you want the oppressive-house dread cranked to an actual horror level.
• The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller, another haunted-estate romance with a con-adjacent heroine and a similarly moody setup.
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the grandmother of all of this, for when you want the dead woman haunting the house done with zero wasted words.

If you want to go straight to the source, here’s A Dreadful Splendor on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Genevieve makes a living lying to grieving people. Did the book ever really force her to reckon with the harm in that, or does the plot let her off the hook because her targets in this particular house “deserve it”?
2. Do you think the romance and the mystery were in balance, or did one crowd out the other for you?
3. Which reveal, if any, felt like it came out of nowhere rather than being earned by earlier clues?
4. Cordelia never gets to speak for herself except through what other people believe about her death. What did you make of how the book handles a dead woman as a plot engine?
5. Would you want a sequel following Genevieve to her next con, or did this story feel complete on its own?