A Grandmother Nobody Knew, and a Con That Gets Complicated

A fortune teller, a fake inheritance, and a house that hates everyone in it

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. Hal (short for Harriet) reads tarot cards on the Brighton pier to pay off a debt to a loan shark who is, not subtly, going to break her fingers if she doesn’t come up with the money soon. She’s twenty two, broke, grieving her mother, and drowning. Then a solicitor’s letter arrives telling her she’s inherited a chunk of a dead stranger’s estate, a woman named Hester Westaway who died at Trepassen House in Cornwall.

Hal knows immediately it’s not her Hester Westaway. Wrong family, wrong generation, has to be a clerical mixup. But she’s desperate enough, and skilled enough at cold reading strangers for a living, that she decides to go to the funeral and see if she can talk her way into some of that money anyway. It’s a con. She knows it’s a con. And that’s the hook that got me, because usually in these books the heroine is an innocent stumbling into danger. Hal walks in with her eyes open, already lying, already calculating angles, and you’re rooting for a grifter to successfully rip off a grieving family. Ware doesn’t shy from that discomfort, she leans into it.

Then Hal gets to Trepassen House and the actual dead woman’s family (three strange uncles, one hostile housekeeper named Mrs. Warren who I will get to) all seem to just accept her as the missing granddaughter, and things get weirder and colder and more wrong with every chapter. No spoilers on where the real family history goes, but let’s just say Hal’s con starts looking a lot less like a con and a lot more like something has been waiting for her specifically.

What actually works, and the one thing that bugged me the whole time

The atmosphere is the best thing here, full stop. Trepassen House is falling apart in that specific English gothic way, no heating, mushrooms growing in the corners, a garden that’s basically reclaimed the property, and Ware writes the cold so well I put a blanket on during a scene set in an unheated bedroom. The housekeeper, Mrs. Warren, is genuinely unsettling in a way that has nothing to do with jump scares, just a woman who watches too closely and says too little. Every scene with her, I tensed up.

I also loved the structure. Ware intercuts Hal’s present day story with old diary entries from decades earlier, written by someone whose identity you’re meant to guess at, and the reveal of who’s actually writing those entries recontextualizes basically the whole book. When it landed for me, I flipped back to reread an earlier diary passage with new eyes, which is exactly what you want a twist to make you do.

Now, the criticism, because there is one and it’s not small. The plot leans hard on coincidence and on people not asking obvious questions. Hal makes a huge fake-identity claim to a family of lawyers and none of them do basic due diligence for way longer than is plausible. There’s a will, there are documents, there’s a whole legal apparatus around this inheritance, and the amount of hand-waving required to keep Hal’s con alive stretches credulity past where I was comfortable. I kept thinking, a family this wealthy would have a solicitor who checks a birth certificate on day one. They don’t, because the plot needs them not to, and you can feel Ware’s hand on the scale.

Tangent, sorry, but I have to say it: I read this maybe eight months after In a Dark, Dark Wood, which I mostly bounced off of, and I went into Westaway expecting to be similarly lukewarm. I wasn’t. It’s a much tighter, moodier, more controlled book, and it made me reconsider whether I’d just caught Ware on an off day with that first one or whether I’m an inconsistent reader who liked this one more because I happened to read it wrapped in a blanket during a thunderstorm. Genuinely not sure. Setting matters more to my ratings than I like to admit.

The ending mostly earns itself. Not entirely, there’s a last-minute reveal involving one of the uncles that felt like it arrived a beat too fast, like Ware needed to wrap things by a certain page count. But the emotional core, about inheritance, about who gets to claim a family and who gets erased from one, that part sticks the landing.

The best gothic mysteries aren’t really about the house. They’re about who the house was built to keep out, and who it trapped inside instead.

About Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware is a British former bookseller and journalist who writes exactly the kind of twisty, atmosphere-heavy suspense novel you want to read on a delayed train with bad weather outside. She’s got a real talent for isolated settings, snowbound cabins, drifting boats, crumbling manors, places you cannot easily leave once things go wrong. She’s often shelved next to Agatha Christie comparisons, which is fair some books, less fair others, but Westaway is probably the one where the comparison earns its keep. She writes fast and she writes a lot, which means the quality varies book to book, but when she’s locked in, she’s genuinely good at dread.

If the fog and the family secrets got you too, read these next

• The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware, for more of her isolated-house dread, this time with a smart home that seems to be actively against the heroine.
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the grandmother of every book like this, and Westaway owes it plenty.
• The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell, for another inheritance-and-secrets plot with a similarly cold, watching household.
• In the Woods by Tana French, if what you actually want is atmosphere over airtight plotting, done by someone even more patient about it.

You can grab a copy here: The Death of Mrs. Westaway on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Hal starts the book actively planning to defraud a grieving family. Did that change how much you trusted her as a narrator, and when (if ever) did that shift?
2. How did the diary sections change your reading of the present day chapters? Did you go back and reread any of them after the reveal?
3. Mrs. Warren is one of the more memorable characters in the book despite limited page time. What makes her work as a source of dread?
4. The plot depends on several characters not asking obvious questions. Did that bother you, or did the atmosphere carry you past it?
5. What do you think the book is actually saying about inheritance and who gets to belong to a family?