After making a spectacle of herself by slapping an author she hardly knows, Jane flees to a bed and breakfast near Ingleside. The ghosts know what she's doing:
This, we thought, is how you reinvent yourself. This is how you disappear.
Going off the map and pretending to be someone else, Jane works on her old thesis topic. Instead of just researching the asylum's record taking, she wants to solve the mystery of N., the Victorian girl who disappeared.
While researching the Farrington records and the Whitmore's records, she embarks on an hasty affair with a younger man, a gardener working on the restoration of Ingleside.
Though this book is ostensibly about missing persons, it's not really a suspenseful thriller; its a thoughtful, lyrical book that explores how trauma in someone's past can paralyze and destroy their present.
For more books with themes that involve missing children, try Gilly Macmillan's What She Knew, Kate Hamer's The Girl in the Red Coat, or Amanda Eyre Ward's How to be Lost.
For another narrative set in England about ghosts and museums, try Kate Mosse's The Taxidermist's Daughter.
As a teenager, Jane lost a child in her charge, Lily, and her life has never been the same. After the incident in t he woods, Jane's life is divided into "before" and "after."
In graduate school, Jane is interested in the strange disappearance of a girl from a nearby Victorian lunatic asylum. Strangely, the girl disappears nearly one hundred years before but in the same woods where Lily disappeared.
The other two escapees from the asylum are found, but the girl, named N. is never found. No records exist for N. which intrigues Jane.
Hunter stretched the boundaries of fiction with her point-of-view choices. Since Jane is an archivist for the Chester Museum, disembodied voices or ghosts are drawn to her. Readers get to hear these voices who remember some faces and incidents from their past but not their names.
Will these voices lead Jane to find out what happened to Lily and N.?
Wherever Jane goes she's an outsider. She does nothing to assert herself until she slaps a man who has affronted her. The man happens to be the father of the Lily, William Eliot.
(continued)
Though this book is ostensibly about missing persons, it's not really a suspenseful thriller; its a thoughtful, lyrical book that explores how trauma in someone's past can paralyze and destroy their present. 
