The Last Spirits of Manhattan: A Novel - Hardcover

McDermott, John A

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668058731 ISBN 13: 9781668058732

Verlag: Atria Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“Pure storytelling magic.” —Diane C. McPhail, USA TODAY bestselling author

Mad Men meets The Gilded Age in this witty and enchanting novel about a young woman in 1950s Manhattan who resists the conventional future planned for her, spurred on by a group of ghostly relatives who are the unexpected guests at a star-studded party thrown by Alfred Hitchcock in the family townhouse.

After fleeing her safe, predictable life in the Midwest, Carolyn Banks finds herself in her recently deceased great-aunts’ once grand mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Inside its crumbling façade, suspense director Alfred Hitchcock is throwing a party, gleefully informing his celebrity guests that the venue is supposedly haunted. It all seems like a fun gag, but Carolyn knows that the line between reality and the supernatural is dangerously blurred here.

Soon, the paranormal entities are mingling with guests like Charles Addams and Henry Fonda. As Carolyn grapples with romantic entanglements and ghostly encounters, she discovers long-buried family secrets, challenging her understanding of love, loyalty, and legacy. A striking mix of the haunting and the heartwarming, The Last Spirits of Manhattan is an “emotionally rich and uplifting story” (Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author) about a family reunion unlike any other, set against the bewitching backdrop of 1950s New York City.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

 John A. McDermott teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University and served on the board of directors for the Writers’ League of Texas. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor, bartender, house painter, and advertising copywriter. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife and teenage daughter. 

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Chapter 1 1
February 11, 1956

WHITE LIGHTS SPARKLED AGAINST the restaurant’s broad windows. Across the harbor, the neighborhoods of Superior, Wisconsin, glowed. If she looked through her reflection to what lay beyond the glass, Carolyn Banks saw long ships in the dark water, ore boats going out to the Great Lakes. Behind the restaurant loomed the hills of Duluth. The Flame had the best view of both cities. Look up and there were the ice-gleaming streets. Look across, there was the frigid lake. Between them was Malcolm, preparing his marriage proposal.

It wasn’t unexpected. Malcolm fondly reminisced about their yearlong courtship as opening argument. He was good at laying things out, but Carolyn found herself listening vaguely, weighing the moment when the house photographer would stroll by to capture her ambivalent mood. The languid notes of the piano in the next room, the candle flickering in the opaque red centerpiece jar, neither made her feel less divided.

Usually when the Flame’s cameraman captured a moment, her older sisters, the twins, Helen and Maud, would laugh and say, “Another toothpaste advertisement!” Carolyn did have a fantastic smile and she dated handsome men. But the twins vetoed boy after boy with extraordinary teeth. “Look at the two of you,” they’d sneered, tossing aside the glossy photo in its thick paper folder. “You’d have monstrous babies.”

Her sisters hadn’t thought anyone was good enough—until Malcolm. Helen and Maud liked him. He was loyal and smart, they were right to point out. That fella’s okay, they chimed. Sure, he had glorious teeth, but it worked. Malcolm looked like Laurence Olivier, and everyone said Carolyn favored Joan Fontaine.

“You make a matching set,” they’d said.

“An imposter pair,” Carolyn countered. “And if we’re playing Rebecca, there has to be a dead wife.”

They laughed. They always laughed. It was a wonderful way to dismiss her. “But he’s one of us,” they insisted.

There it was: Her sisters approved of Malcolm Tower because he fit the family. He had graduated Exeter and then Yale, just like their father and their older brother, Andrew. Malcolm worked at the bank, which their father captained. His job at First National made it cozy. Yet for all their fawning over him, Carolyn waffled. Perhaps that was unwise, but she couldn’t shake her hesitation.

If only her mother were here to tell Carolyn what to do. Her mother, her closest confidante, her sweetest advisor, her best friend, six months dead and forever silent on every matter that confused Carolyn. She would never benefit from her direction or hear her voice again.

And here came the cameraman.

“Smile, lovebirds!” He was older, jovial, a little drunk. An occupational hazard. How else to bear the boredom? This guy had shot every young person in the port cities at least once, twice, maybe more depending on their dating life. Carolyn had half a dozen Flame photos in her scrapbook. This time he lurched before setting the shot and caught himself on the edge of the table, rattling the ice in their cocktails.

“Whoa there,” Malcolm cautioned and slid closer to her, squeaking across the red leather booth, hips touching. He slung one arm around her shoulders and squeezed too tightly. She resisted the fleeting impulse to shake it off, because… why? Malcolm was the real deal, he was. No dead wives in his past, no shadowy children lurking in some forlorn country house. She wasn’t going to do better, and she could have done much, much worse.

Pop! The birth of one more portrait, this one titled Banks in Limbo.

After the war, when the boys came back—except for Andrew, who’d died on Normandy Beach—the twins had gathered handfuls of proposals. Some of those guys would have married any breathing body. Her sisters, far better than merely breathing, had both hitched young. Carolyn was only thirteen on V-E Day, but now at twenty-four, she knew what those fellas wanted: a darling miss; the house with the sugar-scented kitchen; the well-tended children. Safety. Her mother had offered the same a generation earlier (not that it saved her from grief or cancer). Carolyn found her sisters’ beaux from those years too intense, so dedicated to doing well in school, landing a spouse, getting ahead in a career. And here was Malcolm, too young to have been called up for Europe or Japan, and lucky to have missed Korea, but still gung-ho to settle down. He was college-educated, able-bodied, and gainfully employed, dating an intelligent, attractive woman who supposedly loved him. He wouldn’t expect anything but affirmation.

Where did her diffidence come from? Her father would call it dithering. Malcolm was offering her everything her sisters had. Here was security and happiness on a clean and sturdy plate. Take it, her mother might have said, and Andrew, sweet dead Andy, what would he have given for that sort of life?

The strand of electric lights blocking the full view of the lake didn’t feel romantic; they were tired remnants from holidays past. Leftovers. Malcolm had come back to Superior after New Haven and had met Carolyn while she was helping her mother bear the indignities of her last months. The twins, busy with their own small children, had helped, but Carolyn was the most attentive nurse. It was a string of hazy days, of baths and bedpans, pills for her swelling, pills for her pain. Dates with Malcolm were an escape from her mother’s illness. With her mother gone, Carolyn felt elbowed into marrying a boy who treated her well. She couldn’t stay on the market forever, her sisters warned. This time, with this boy, she should say yes.

The bulb flashed again. Malcolm beamed his matinee-idol smile; he could turn the charm off and on at will. She imagined what the photographer saw, their grinning, not-entirely-sober faces. Pretty people in a pretty place by pretty plates. Her mind flashed to her work at Sutter’s, the store where she clerked, here on the Minnesota side of the bridge. Carolyn appreciated the store’s ordered beauty, the delicate bone china in tasteful patterns, the gleaming silverware, or silver plate if you were on a budget. Place settings, wineglasses, water goblets, demitasse cups. It was frivolous and functional and really meant nothing, but everything, at once. Carolyn had worked at the shop in Duluth all through high school and then again after she’d dropped out of the university in Madison. She dealt with nervous brides all the time, all day long. She didn’t relish being one.

And after the vows, she’d probably have to give up her job: Betty, her last single friend from high school, had just gotten married and promptly canned from the phone company because the boss didn’t think married women needed the work. “You’ve got a husband now,” he told her as he handed her the pink slip. “Relax. Let him bring home the bacon. You have a baby.”

Would Mr. Sutter fire her if she went from Carolyn Banks to Carolyn Tower? Worse, Malcolm would expect her to quit. He’d want a wife just like his mother. Just like her sisters. How her aunts, back East—well, great-aunts—had counseled Maud and Helen when they were teenagers and Carolyn, still a child, her mouth full of angel cake, had squirmed at their advice for women of means.

“If you play with pigs,” Great-Aunt Isabella had pronounced in the ornate parlor of her Manhattan home, “you are going to get dirty.”

She’d steadied her gaze at the girls, first the twins, then at...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668058731
• ISBN 13: 9781668058732
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande