I love gothic mysteries and gothic romance. When I was a teen I found a whole shelf of Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney in our basement and devoured them. When I’d finished them, my mom gave me historical romances to read. Gothics were my gateway drug.

The Darkling Bride is a gothic mystery set in Ireland with the requisite crumbling castles, ghosts, and family secrets. It also features a side romance. I found the mystery element enjoyable, as well as the romance, but the overall book suffers from Too Much Going On as well as uneven pacing.

The book is set in three parts: the late eighteen hundreds, 1992 and the present day. The action centers on Deeprath Castle (I know) in Ireland, parts of it dating back to the twelfth century, and owned by generations of  the Gallagher family.

In 1879, Gothic novelist Evan Chase goes to Deeprath looking for inspiration. Instead he falls in love with Jenny Gallagher, the daughter of Viscount Gallagher. After a brief courtship they marry, despite the Viscount’s warning that Jenny suffers from bouts of madness. Shortly after the birth of their son, Jenny commits suicide and Evan never writes again. The castle is rumored to be haunted by the ghost of Jenny, or the Darkling Bride (a folktale) or both.

In 1992, the castle is home to Lily and Cillian Gallagher, as well as their ten-year-old son Aiden and his fifteen-year-old sister Kyla. On the day of Cillian’s fiftieth birthday, Aiden finds his father’s body in the library, bludgeoned to death. Later his mother’s body is found at the base of the Bride Tower (the same tower that housed Jenny during her episodes of madness). The case is never solved, but it’s assumed that either Lily killed Cillian and then herself or that it was a robbery gone wrong.

Cut to the present day. Aiden is the current Viscount and has no interest in keeping the castle. He’s arranged for it to be put into a national trust, and the matriarch of the family, his Aunt Nessa, has hired Carragh Ryan to catalog the immense library beforehand. Carragh loves Evan Chase’s books, so this is a huge deal for her.

When she arrives at Deeprath Castle she finds out the library hasn’t been opened since that night in 1992. Also there are rumors that Evan’s final and never-published book, The Darkling Bride, might be hidden in the library. She also finds out that the Gallaghers, now all assembled, are a super dysfunctional and frosty family.

The book jumps back and forth between time periods. At first I assumed that Jenny’s story would be the primary mystery (was she mad? Did her dad really lock her in the Bride Tower? Why do guys thinking locking women in towers is a good plan?), but it’s really what happened to Lily and Cillian. First, the police want one last look at the library before the castle goes o the national trust. Then Carragh finds the clues to a scavenger hunt Lily made for Cillian for his birthday–which completely justifies why I think gifts like that are the WORST.

So Aiden and Carragh decide to follow the clues and also start to have pants feelings for each other.

I liked the romance and I was happy with how the mystery ended, but getting there was a little bit of a slog. The whole book felt half a beat off, the excellent creepy parts never really delivering the intended punch. It was like the elements of a good gothic mystery were all there, but the atmosphere lacked the correct sense of urgency or dread.

For example, Clue 1 leads Carragh and Aiden to Clue 2…at which point they decide to break for lunch. FOR LUNCH.

You don’t break for lunch when solving a murder in a creepy haunted castle! You grab a protein bar and an apple, put on your most diaphanous nightgown and YOU GET SHIT DONE.

Later they have to wait an entire day because of a ball. I mean, I’m all for balls in haunted castles, but again, YOU WORRY ABOUT THAT LATER.

Since I was apparently the only person with a sense of urgency regarding the murder/suicide thing, every time another clue dropped I waited for the DUN DUN DUN moment and for people to do things, goddamnit, but that moment rarely came. So while the mystery intrigued me intellectually, it never really hit me emotionally.

Part of this could be that the book suffered from Too Much Going On. We have Jenny Gallagher’s tragic tale. We have the mystery of Lily and Cillian’s deaths. We have a love story. We have Aiden’s strained relationship with his family. We have Carragh’s strained relationship with her family. Carragh is Chinese by birth but was adopted by a White American family and we have moments where she deals with a sense of Otherness, but it passes so quickly that I wasn’t sure why it was there. We have the house Carragh inherited from her grandmother that she’s not sure what to do with (which again detracts rather than adds to anything). We have scenes from the point of view of the detective assigned to Lily and Cillian’s cold case.

It’s a lot and when as a reader I’m already balancing three narratives in three time periods, it became overwhelming and contributed to the plodding pace.

Overall I found the idea behind The Darkling Bride to be one I really liked, but the execution made me less satisfied with the book than I’d hoped.