The Dark Unwinding (review)

Orphaned at a young age in Victorian London, Katharine Tulman has spent the majority of her seventeen years playing servant to her hateful aunt and the woman's equally foul son. When Aunt Alice gets word that her eccentric brother-in-law is squandering the family estate (and her son's inheritance), she sends Katharine off to the remote family mansion to have the old man committed to an asylum. Upon her arrival, Katharine discovers that her uncle is certainly strange, but he is also likely a genius, running a workshop that produces fantastic automatons and employs the entirety of a nearby village. Katharine's mission to have him institutionalized is complicated first by her growing affection for her uncle and the people who work for him (especially his handsome apprentice) and then by the hallucinations and visions that begin to plague her the longer she stays at the estate, putting her own sanity into question. From the blustery moors that surround the mansion to the Byronic love interest to the blurred line between reality and insanity, this has all the fare any Gothic fan could ask for. Katharine is likable but far from sweet, looking out for her interests from the beginning; her casual acceptance of her aunt's ire and her status as merely a financial burden will nonetheless evoke sympathy from the reader. The uncle is a bit of a caricature as the genius savant, but the people that rely upon him for the livelihood are heartbreakingly authentic, making Katharine's ultimate decision even more triumphant. An author's note revealing the true-life inspiration for the story—a nineteenth-century British duke with a thing for underground mazes and pink walls—will send the history buffs straight to Wikipedia, but any reader looking for romance, thrills, and mystery will find this entirely satisfying.