Something is not right in Emily's new house in the historic London neighborhood of Hound Hill. It's not just the hollowed-out treads worn in the crooked wooden stairs or the hearth that survives from the seventeenth century. It has more to do with the sudden appearance of a wild-eyed young man looking for a small kitten with a bent tail. And the discovery of a black rat in the chimney - the same kind of rat that was responsible for the dreaded bubonic plague that killed tens of thousands of Londoners in the 1665 epidemic.
Readers will be swept up in this riveting and suspenseful tale that vividly reveals the great suffering of the Black Death, a disease that killed almost a quarter of the population of London.
The book begins with Emily moving into her new house. Slowly, as the book goes on, she meet characters who are out of place in town and comes to realize they are ghosts left over from the plague in London long ago.
To be honest, there isn't much for me to write about this book. I hardly know what to say. Nothing struck me as either good or bad. It was simply one of those blah books that doesn't have much to say.
Despite this, I do have to mention that the idea for the book was wonderful. I was intrigued by the details of old London leaking into the book and by all the things I didn't know about the Black Death that surfaced here. It's obvious that the author did her research before writing, which is always a good thing to see.
Although the idea was good, the plot simply wasn't there. There wasn't much happening and, when things did happen, they would be following by a boring chapter that I would have to force myself to read. In all honesty, I skimmed the end of the book because it was boring me. I had a hard time paying attention because the book didn't capture it.
That being said, I feel it fair to give this book a middle rating simply because nothing was terrible but nothing was good.
Rating: C-
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