“The house, long abandoned, had stories to tell. The house was a contradiction. Clearly well-loved at one time, but left to rot.”

The coast of Maine is known for its remote beauty and troubled history --- a history from which Jane Flanagan has tried to distance herself for years. But she returns to her small coastal town of Awadapquit following her mother’s death. Jane had left her mother and sister, both of whom struggled with alcohol, in favor of a well-ordered life in academia, working as an archivist at Harvard. But due to a recent drunken episode, she’s put on probationary leave from her job, and her husband, David, has asked for them to “take some time apart.”

"J. Courtney Sullivan expertly walks the fine line between an engagingly creepy mystery and the troubled history of the Pine Tree State and its subsequent sanitation.... It takes a steady, adroit hand to entertain as well as educate, and Sullivan does just that with THE CLIFFS."

After her mother’s funeral, Jane continues to stay on in Awadapquit, ostensibly under the guise of cleaning out her mother's small, cluttered home before putting it on the market. But she knows on some level that she’s hiding out --- from her life, her mistakes and her future: “Jane had tried, at some desperate point with David, to blame what happened on grief. Grief for her mother that she wasn’t even sure she felt. She felt it now in some new, unbearable way. Tangled up with her regret over him.” After getting a session with a local medium as a gift from her best friend, Allison, Jane has been given a mysterious message from beyond about a death at the beloved old Victorian house she’s admired for years.

The house, which sits on a foreboding cliff overlooking the ocean, was originally built by a sea captain who perished and drowned when his ship sank on their return voyage. But it’s been mostly abandoned since the 1950s and ’60s, and teenage Jane would spend countless afternoons exploring the house and grounds and reading near the headstones in the family cemetery. It was her escape from her chaotic home life. Her mother was typically passed out on their couch when she wasn’t flirting with the married men in their town. But maybe the love of this old house was why Jane went into archivism. She had always wondered who lived there before and what their story was.

In the last year, the house was sold to a couple from Beacon Hill, who committed to renovating the place without a care for the exorbitant cost or the history they were destroying in the process. Allison warns Jane about Genevieve, the Boston socialite wife who bought the place for herself, her husband Paul, and their young son, Ben. But despite the costly renovation, Genevieve feels uneasy in her new home. Ben tells her that the ghost of a little girl visits him. Did she upset the ghosts of the house’s past with her careless remodel? She decides to hire Jane to research the house’s history in an effort to get some answers. But delving deep into the past often brings up more questions. Who is the mysterious D., who perished on the grounds of the home? Is she the ghost talking to Ben? Does she mean the family harm?

In her latest outing, J. Courtney Sullivan expertly walks the fine line between an engagingly creepy mystery and the troubled history of the Pine Tree State and its subsequent sanitation. While crafting the compelling story of Jane, Genevieve and the storied house, Sullivan delves into Maine’s complicated history with Native Americans, and how white settlers took the land from the indigenous people and claimed it as their own, as well as committing various atrocities. (The book is dedicated to Donna Loring, a tribal member of the Penobscot Indian Nation and their representative to the Maine State Legislature.)

It takes a steady, adroit hand to entertain as well as educate, and Sullivan does just that with THE CLIFFS. Does our past inform our future? Jane herself wonders: “Did the living matter as much to the dead as the dead did to the living?” Maybe that is exactly what writer/philosopher George Santayana meant when he said, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”