{"id":3777,"date":"2024-07-25T15:23:54","date_gmt":"2024-07-25T15:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3777"},"modified":"2024-08-08T15:24:07","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T15:24:07","slug":"gothictown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3777","title":{"rendered":"Gothictown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Locals call small-town Juliana, Georgia, \u201cGentle Juliana.\u201d New York chef Bille Hope calls it her family\u2019s best chance at a new start after the pandemic finished her restaurant. The offer to move to Juliana is incredibly generous: the ad Billie spots says that the family can buy any vacant home in the town\u2014look at those Victorian mansions!\u2014for just $100 if they open a business there. Billie; her husband, Peter; and their daughter, Mere, are Georgia residents before you know it and even purchase a fabulous house that wasn\u2019t supposed to be available. In no time, Billie\u2019s new restaurant is booming, but so is the family\u2019s fear that they have made a bad mistake. The house has a malevolent feeling and Peter is exhausted and depressed by his never-ending search for a dangerous open well that a strange neighbor tells them is on the land. While Billie begins to fall for the owner of the store next to hers, she also starts to investigate what\u2019s really going on in the town and why she and Mere have the same nightmares about trapped, crying children, a puzzle that readers know a little about from the book\u2019s sinister opening chapter detailing an event in the town\u2019s early years. <strong>This has just the right amount of creepiness to add a scary but not terrifying element to the promised gothic tale, and the post-pandemic what-do-I-do-now feeling is spot on.<\/strong> Read this alongside Sylvie Perry\u2019s <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2609\">The Hawthorne School<\/a><\/em><\/strong> and start looking gift horses in the mouth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Locals call small-town Juliana, Georgia, \u201cGentle Juliana.\u201d New York chef Bille Hope calls it her family\u2019s best chance at a new start after the pandemic finished her restaurant. The offer&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[108,52,111,51],"class_list":["post-3777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-gothic","tag-psychological","tag-southern","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Gothic-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Gothic.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}