The Cliffs

Bestseller Sullivan (Friends and Strangers) toys with gothic and supernatural elements in her propulsive latest. After a drunken faux pas lands Harvard archivist Jane Flanagan in trouble at work and on the rocks with her husband, she moves back into her recently deceased mother’s house in coastal Maine. Grief and shame weigh heavily on her, so when Genevieve, the new owner of a neighboring cliffside mansion, offers Jane a research project, she jumps at the chance for a distraction. Genevieve has overheard her young son talking to someone in an upstairs bedroom who might be a ghost, and she asks Jane to investigate the house’s history, terrified that her renovations—including digging up graves to make room for a swimming pool—have disturbed the spirits of those buried on the property. The stories Jane discovers reach back through the Victorian era to encounters between Indigenous people and colonists, and include a rewarding twist that sheds light on long-held mysteries from Jane’s childhood. Sullivan leans on many pages of exposition and a few too many coincidences to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, but, for the most part, the plot motors along like a well-oiled machine. This satisfies. (July)