Book Review: Hunter's Hill

Title: Hunter's Hill

(Not to be confused with Harriette Simpson Arnow's Hunter's Horn, a greatly superior novel.)

Author: Mary Bishop

Date: 1973

Publisher: Dell

ISBN: none

Length: 303 pages

Quote: “So far as we know, Frances simply walked out of this house, and no one has seen her since.”

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Miss Eden Chase is hired as governess to Frances' daughter, who is recovering slowly from an injury. She doesn't really want to go; both her previous employer (she sees herself as a librarian not a governess) and she have been lavishly bribed, because Frances' father would like to remarry, if anyone can find Frances. Frances was spending a lot of time with a self-proclaimed count from Italy before she became a Missing Person. Nobody has been able to find either the alleged count or Frances as hypothetical countess. People are beginning to mutter that Frances may be dead.

Eden has bad feelings about the whole Hunter's Hill estate. It's all so Gothic. Frances' not suitably grief-stricken husband and daughter share the big house with a full domestic staff, the husband's brother and his wife, and an eccentric great-aunt on the third floor. People keep telling Eden very exciting things about the whole clan—any of the males might be in love with her, any of the females might be insane and dangerous, or, for that matter, so might the males, and Tony, the too-cheerful divorced or widowed husband, just might have killed Frances himself.

And Eden...isn't very bright, which may be why her previous employer was so easily bribed to pack her off to Hunter's Hill. She seems addicted to the adrenalin rush of excitement, whether it's Romantic Love or mortal terror. She's not sure she believes that Tony is “in love” with her. She's not sure he's emotionally stable enough to be anyone's lover. She's not sure he didn't kill Frances. She's not sure he doesn't plan to kill her too. She's just having a wonderful time reacting to it all.

You'll probably see the solution to the mystery and the climactic scene coming, well before page 200, but I'll leave you that much suspense at least. All I'll say is that I think Eden's survival makes this a sad story from the injured child's point of view.

Evidently other people agree with me about the unadmirability of these characters, because this book has become quite rare. In one of those outrageous miscarriages of bookselling justice for which Amazon is notorious...because it's a cheap second-rate melodrama, the best price this web site can offer online will be $210 per book plus $5 per package (eight or twelve books this size will ship in one package) plus $3 per online payment. (In real life, the copy I have for sale will cost more than other lightly used books that still smell more of paper, ink, and glue than of mold, but less than $210.)