cover image The Inheritance

The Inheritance

Tom Savage. Dutton Books, $23.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94423-2

Savage has garnered plenty of praise for plotting and taut prose of previous thrillers, including Valentine (1996). He takes a different, less successful turn in this unabashedly old-fashioned gothic mystery--weighted with cliches, contrivance and coincidence--about a young woman who learns that she's the heiress to a fabulous, haunted fortune. Fullsome lines like ""That snowy twentieth of December, the day of the next death"" (offered as a sentence) may attempt to parody the gothic novel but in effect interrupt the flow of the complicated narrative. A dying old woman, Alicia Randall Wainwright, instructs a lawyer to track down the baby girl who was born in prison and given up for adoption after her actress mother shot and killed her husband, Alicia's nephew, James Randall. That's how Holly Smith of Indio, Calif., learns that she is really Holly Randall, owner of a vast estate in Connecticut and assorted extras adding up to a $600 million fortune. There are, to be sure, a few small drawbacks: an uncle and aunt who want Holly dead badly enough to hire a Mafia hit man; an eccentric, chess-playing relative who hides in the attic; a young woman who roams the estate at night, burying and digging up a doll. Holly is perky and beautiful, so she seems equal to the task of being a Randall--especially as she has a few sly tricks up her own sleeve. Savage exhibits skillful craftsmanship here but doesn't seem to have his heart in it. (Aug.)