5 Kate Morton-Approved Novels That Explore Past and Present

The premise is irresistible: a single mum whose little boy suffers nightmares and keeps asking when he can go home. The only problem is, he’s already there. Determined to find out what’s happening, she teams up with a professor of psychology whose lifetime obsession with things unseen has alienated him from his colleagues. Their search leads them to the door of a woman whose son has been missing for eight years and, finally, answers seem close at hand. Part mystery and part meditation on a mother’s love for her child, this clever, heartfelt book kept me turning pages long into the night.

A beautifully written novel combining three of my favorite things: history, mystery, and memory. An elderly woman called Iris receives an invitation to the reunion of a group of nurses who operated a hospital in France during the First World War. We know immediately that something happened back then that makes Iris reluctant to attend, and soon learn that she’s been keeping a deep secret for a very long time. Luckily for us, the invitation’s arrival jolts Iris’s memory and takes us with her into the past where MacColl brings wartime France to vivid life.

Barbara Vine is the mistress of the psychological mystery. Her stories weave between the present and the past, and center on a secret that refuses to stay hidden. A DARK-ADAPTED EYE opens in the viewpoint of a girl called Faith who’s sitting in the kitchen of her parents’ house, waiting for something terrible to happen. We soon realize that Faith’s aunt Vera is to be put to death that morning for the murder of her beloved younger sister, Eden. The rest of the book, set in England during the Second World War, seeks to uncover why.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .” It’s one of the best first lines ever, and Manderley, the house at the story’s heart, is a magnificent creation, a place of menace and foreboding (not least due to its keeper, Mrs. Danvers), based on the real life Cornish house, Menabilly, with which du Maurier was fascinated. I love books where the house is a character, especially when it keeps a deep, dark secret. For its brooding atmosphere and tangible sense of place, this suspenseful mystery about the haunting of the present by the past is one of my favorites.

A man looks back on his life to remember the hot English summer of 1900 when, as a schoolboy, he went to stay with a friend in a grand country house and found himself acting as the go-between for a pair of star-crossed lovers. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is the famous opening line, and, as the novel progresses, this statement plays out with devastating consequences. Not a mystery so much as a tragedy, THE GO-BETWEEN is elegantly written and has a strong sense of place; most satisfying of all, there’s a perfect inevitability to the unfolding story and its ultimate conclusion.