The Darkness Surrounds Us

Lukasik (White Like Her) delivers a gripping ghost story of pandemics past in this well-crafted gothic mystery. During the 1918 flu epidemic, nurse Nellie Lester leaves her work in a Chicago contagion ward to care for the wife of a logger baron in a mansion on a Lake Michigan island that—based on an old photograph—she suspects may harbor secrets her late mother kept from her, including her father’s identity. Once there, Nellie is haunted by frequent visions of her mother’s ghost in the small turret bedroom she stays in, while the library offers hints that her parents were part of the mysterious community that built up and then abruptly abandoned the island two decades earlier. When the body of the mansion’s previous nurse turns up in the woods, Nellie attempts to investigate her death, but locals become increasingly angry about a stranger poking her nose into their business. Readers will sympathize with Nellie’s fears and frustrations, and Lukasik maintains a deliciously dark tension throughout. With unpredictable plotting and superior atmospherics, this is an early-autumn treat fit for late-night devouring.(Sept.)