Death in Summer

William Trevor

The plot of Death in Summer is simple. It's summer in a beautiful, quiet corner of rural England. A recent widower, Thaddeus Davenant (for some inexplicable reason almost everyone in this novel has a Star Wars name: his housekeeper is Zenobia Maidment) advertises for a nanny for his baby daughter. As it turns out, none of the four girls who come for interview is suitable and Davenant's mother-in-law fills the post. But one of the candidates, an untidy dreamer of a girl named Pettie has already developed a fixation with the baby, Davenant himself and, well, everything about the house which makes it such an attractive alternative to the shabby city life which is all she has known up till then. Convincing herself that Davenant would have happily employed her without the mother-in-law's intervention Pettie plots her revenge.

There are strong echoes in Death in Summer of William Trevor's previous book, Felicia's Journey. As I was reading I also kept thinking how much it felt like a Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine (I'm think of Judgement in Stone, in which a family brings disaster on itself by slighting the housekeeper, and A Fatal Inversion which has the same parched high-summer rural setting).

The story zipped along quite nicely (though somehow dreamily) and contains a moving and startling finale but I wonder if it'll really linger long in my memory.