My Sister’s Shadow

The relationship between identical twins fractures in this underheated gothic suspense novel from Gilchrist (The Mayfair Dagger, as Ava January). Though British sisters Adelaide and Victoria Windlass look exactly alike, they couldn’t be more different: Adelaide is meek and malleable, Victoria haughty and assertive. In 1904, the girls’ father summons James Henry Gilbraith, aka Lord Stanley, an earl who’s decamped to New York City, to Harewood Hall, the Windlass estate. Lord Stanley shocks the family with a marriage proposal, prompting both sisters to move to the United States—Adelaide as a frightened bride-to-be, Victoria as her seething companion. As the sisters settle into their lives in New York, minor tensions between them grow into cavernous schisms, and Stanley’s motives come into question. The plot simmers with the threat of violence, but Gilchrist takes too long to let things boil over. Though the action picks up in the final third, as Adelaide’s mental health deteriorates, by then many readers may have abandoned ship. This misses the mark. Agent: Jacqueline Lipton, Tobias Literary. (Mar.)