At the Stroke of Midnight by Jenni Keer
This historical mystery is a fun and suspenseful read. It is 1923 and Pearl Glenham lives with her accountant father in a small town in England. He mourns his wife, and is fixated on the time she supposedly died, four minutes past ten, and doesn't seem to be interested in anything but his job. Pearl does all the domestic chores, submitting to his demands, and leads a quiet life. But her best friend Harriet is more adventurous and has always encouraged her to rebel against her father's expectations. Pearl also has a secret, that she also has developed a secret compulsion regarding time, and has a collection of timepieces that she has stolen over many months. She also has an obsession with water, and has taken up swimming, becoming quite competent.
Her father tells her that they have been invited to Highcliffe House, a country house on the Dorset coast for the weekend, and must go. He plans for them to travel there in two days so they arrive fresh, and seems to know how to get to the house, although he claims that it is for business and that he doesn't know the house or the host. The owners of the house, the English woman who grew up there, Lenora, and her husband, an American named Virgil Brockhurst haven't been seen in twenty years. They had spent time traveling when they first married, and had returned with a young child, saying that they intended to stay for some years, but disappeared again shortly after their arrival.
Pearl had come across the invitation her father received before they left home and suspected that the contents implied blackmail coerced her father to accept the invitation. So she is watching what happens carefully. Once they arrive at the house, it soon becomes apparent that he has met the other two guests, although they all pretend they haven't. Besides the guests, one of them has brought her husband, an Italian man who knows no English, and there are two temporary servants, a young man named Ellery Brown, who is rooming offsite, and an older woman named Mrs. Dawson who is doing the cooking. After lunch, Pearl is able to escape the house and go down to the beach for a swim in the ocean. While there, she sees an unusually dressed man go to a cave she hadn't noticed before and then return to the path to the house. When she enters the cave she notes many odd items, seemingly overflow from the many strange collectables she'd seen in the house itself. As she investigated a curious clock with funnels that seemed to run it, she tripped and fell and a drop of the liquid in one of the funnels spilt and ran into her mouth. She immediately returned to the house and after an uncomfortably tense afternoon and dinner, retired to her room, awakening later to find smoke at her door and unable to escape the fire in the house. But after succumbing to the smoke she finds herself back in the cave in the afternoon, replaying the day she just went through.
As she goes through this again and again, trying to change the outcome of the day, escape the fire, and make sense of what is happening, she is joined by someone else who gets caught in the same repetitive time period and the two join forces to find answers.
This is a story of a young woman finding her independence, a story of romance and intrigue, death and second chances. Very enjoyable and I found myself eager to see what each new iterance of the day brought and what the truth of the circumstances was.
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