The Lake House is Kate Morton’s latest wonderful piece of completely escapist fiction. Having previously enjoyed and blogged on her work I had been looking forward to reading her latest and it definitely didn’t disappoint.

As usual it is two stories in one – a contemporary mystery weaved together this time with an unsolved case from the interwar period. It’s set in Cornwall and the house and grounds it described kept reminding me of The Lost Gardens of Heligan. It’s a novel all about lost children. A modern day case of a child abandoned by its mother has left policewoman Sadie unable to believe the official police conclusion and disgraced and licking her wounds at her grandfather’s house in the Cornish countryside. Whilst out running she comes across an abandoned house, and her interest piqued, starts to unravel the mystery of a child who disappeared from there seventy years earlier.

The story of Sadie, her grandfather and the author Alice Edevane, who used to live in the lake house and whose brother it was that disappeared in the 1930s, become increasingly intertwined as the novel reaches its satisfying conclusion. If these kinds of intergenerational mysteries are for you then I can highly recommend this extremely enjoyable and well executed one.