Mystery twists, turns engagingly

Ruth Ware, author of “The Woman in Cabin 10,” is a master of old-fashioned mysteries with modern twists.

Her leisurely and sinister latest work, “The Death of Mrs. Westaway,” plays with the conventions of stories about creaky old British country houses and an orphaned young woman. It nods to the novels of Agatha Christie and to Daphne DuMaurier’s “Rebecca.”

This orphan, however, was born in 1995.

“Small, skinny, pale” and 21, Harriet, more commonly known as Hal, has been on her own for the past three years, since her single mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident.

She has taken her mother’s place as a fortuneteller specializing in tarot-card readings on the Brighton Pier. It’s not much of a living, particularly during the winter, and Hal has • “The Death of Mrs. Westaway” (Scout, 384 pages, $26.99) by Ruth Ware

made the mistake of borrowing money for rent from a loan shark, whose minions are threatening her with violence.

So when she gets a letter from a lawyer informing her that her grandmother, Hester Westaway, has died and that her “substantial” estate will be distributed to beneficiaries after her funeral and wake, the news sounds like the answer to Hal’s prayers.

Unfortunately, even though Hal’s last name is Westaway, she knows that Hester wasn’t actually her grandmother.

With nothing to lose, Hal decides to see whether she can use the psychological skills she has gained working in the fortunetelling booth to con her way into some money.

She makes her way to the drafty old house, where she meets her supposed grandmother’s three suspicious sons and their families as well as an ancient housekeeper with a voice “cracked as a raven’s” and a mouth that forms “a thin line of pinched disapproval.”

The housekeeper installs Hal in a drafty attic room that bolts from outside; on a barred window inside, she finds etched the words “Help me.”

Hal — bright and determined, if perhaps out of her depth — is no victim, and as Ware pits her against the rest of the family, individually and en masse, the reader’s sense of the cat and the mouse in this game constantly shifts.

Hal’s desperate scheme shapes what she, and the reader, sees, as her understanding of the family’s complicated past, and her place in it, gains focus.

Ware reveals a large cast of characters gradually, with practiced skill, averting confusion.

Although Hal, like the practical mother who warns her, “Never believe your own patter,” doesn’t think that the cards she turns have mystical power, she knows that they can, for the observant, reveal what’s been repressed or concealed by both the reader and the client.

Just as the cards disclose meanings deeper and more complicated than their superficial ones, the novel hints at haunting emotional truths under its playful tribute to traditional crime novels.

com