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Thriller | Mystery | Psychological Fiction | Suspense
The Death of Mrs. Westaway Review
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like for a single letter to upend your entire life in a way that feels eerie, uncanny, and thoroughly tangled in family secrets, The Death of Mrs. Westaway is exactly the kind of gothic suspense you need.
“You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt.”
Hal (Harriet Westaway), a struggling tarot reader still reeling from her mother’s death, receives a letter from a lawyer she’s never heard of. At first, she assumes it’s another collector chasing a bill. Instead, it’s a notice informing her she’s been named in her grandmother’s will… a grandmother she does not actually have. Hal knows she isn’t the right Harriet Westaway, but armed with the tarot tricks and intuition her mother taught her, she decides to take a chance. Maybe she can fool a wealthy family long enough to snag the inheritance and crawl out of the crushing survival mode she’s been stuck in.
But once Hal arrives in Penzance, things begin to unravel fast. After an awkward funeral, she’s swept to the family estate, a looming, frigid gothic house with creaking floors, an attic room with locks mounted on the outside, barred windows, and a housekeeper (Ms. Warren) who feels one sharp word away from a full haunting. She meets her so-called “uncles” Harding, Abel, and Ezra, along with Harding’s wife, Mitzi, and their children. It’s all peculiar enough… until Abel hands Hal a photograph. Her mother, the real one, stands smiling in the frame. Suddenly, the lie she came to tell starts to feel dangerously close to the truth.
The creepy vibes in The Death of Mrs. Westaway go hard. We’re talking magpies that stir buried memories, corpse-like trees, a lake that smells wrong, a collapsing boathouse, and a winter storm closing in around the estate like a warning. I won’t go further than that, because everything after this point becomes spoiler territory, and you know I don’t spoil the good stuff.
What I loved is how this mystery hits all the classic boxes:
- A chilling estate in the dead of winter
- An FMC who refuses to ignore loose ends
- A villain hidden in plain sight
- A story that ties itself up without dangling threads
The only adjustment for me was Hal’s constant inner monologue. At first, it felt a little wordy, but once I settled into it, I realized it was doing heavy emotional lifting. It lets you live inside Hal’s grief, fear, suspicion, and determination, and honestly, it works. It also seems to be part of Ruth Ware’s style, and I’d absolutely read more from her.
The Death of Mrs. Westaway review barely scratches the surface of its eerie charm.
If you like mystery thrillers with creepy estates, family secrets, tarot-adjacent vibes, and that classic “is the house alive or am I losing my mind” atmosphere, add this to your T.B.R. immediately, especially for a cold, snowy night. You can find it here – The Death of Mrs. Westaway on Books-A-Million or Here on Amazon
If this Death of Mrs. Westaway review tempted you into the shadows, you can explore more gothic mysteries and thrillers in the Growls and Grimm Library or wander through Books & Bookish for your next eerie obsession.