Westaway by Ruth Ware, twenty-one-year-old Harriet “Hal” Westaway was struggling to make ends meet when she received notification she had been named as a beneficiary in Mrs. Our reluctant con artist, Hal, slowly begins to suspect that maybe she’s the one who’s been conned into a fatal trap.The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: Ware, Ruth. Warren, grudgingly shows Hal her bedroom, a bare chamber in the attic with bars on the tiny window and, as she will discover, the words “HELP ME” scratched into the glass. Then she’s driven to the family manse, Trepassen House, a gloomy pile sans central heating that’s encircled by menacing magpies straight out of “ The Birds.” The aforementioned housekeeper, Mrs. Hal bluffs her way through her first graveside encounter with her “uncles” - the Westaway adult children and their partners.

Fans of Ware’s most recent bestsellers, “ The Woman in Cabin 10” and “ The Lying Game,” will recognize her predilection for making nature’s elements a felt presence in her stories here, extreme weather - in the form of “lashing rain,” fierce gales, ice and a freak blizzard - plays a malevolent role. It’s pouring buckets when Hal arrives at the church where the funeral is being held outside Penzance. The only problem is, Hal knows that her mother’s mother died decades ago the lawyer must have her confused with another Harriet Westaway. The tantalizing phrase “substantial size of the estate”Ĭatches Hal’s eye.

The other is a missive on heavy stationery from a solicitor’s firm in Cornwall, informing Hal of the death of her maternal grandmother and summoning Hal to a reading of the will. Two letters stand out in the pile: One is a threat from a loan shark she naively borrowed money from months ago. When she arrives in her chilly flat, Hal tears open her damp meal of takeout fish and chips and surveys the overdue notices that have arrived in that day’s mail. She never knew her father’s identity, and ever since the hit-and-run death of her mother three years ago, Hal has been eking out a living reading tarot cards in a seedy resort town on the English Channel. The novel opens on, well, a dark and stormy night as a lone young woman scurries her way homeward along a deserted seaside promenade.

The death mrs westaway