Moonrise by Cassandra King
First Wife, Second Wife, Green-eyed Monster

Where does a fiction writer get ideas?
Imagine she rents a historic summer house in the Blue Ridge Mountains and comes across its eerily beautiful, but neglected garden—a garden that only blooms at night.
Imagine that this writer stumbles over a strange circle of stones that marks the grave of the previous owner, the lady of the house.
Now, picture this writer with a favorite book in her hand—Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, published 75 years ago, a classic telling of a second wife and her older husband living in a menacing house that had been in his family for generations.
Suppose the writer wanders through the dark corridors of the rented house, taking on the mindset of a second wife who surely must have questions about holding her own against a dead woman. What was the first wife like—beautiful, wealthy, self-assured?
Then conjure du Maurier’s themes in Rebecca: jealousy and envy. You have wonderful fodder for a story. More than that, you have the origins and the story for Moonrise, the very seductive novel by Cassandra King.
Daphne du Maurier wrote in her notes about her novel, Rebecca: “Very roughly, the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second, until wife 2 is haunted day and night… a tragedy is looming very close and crash! Bang! Something happens.”
In Moonrise, as in Rebecca, we have allusions to this “something,” from the first page, and it keeps a reader turning to the next, and the next, to discover more about King’s fictional “first wife,” Rosalyn, along with hidden secrets of hatred, adultery and deceit.
Rebecca has long been viewed as a classic tale of deception and betrayal. It presents serious flaws in upper-class society and lays open the struggle between good and evil within the individual. It’s also a lot like a Lifetime Movie … even a soap opera.
Moonrise? It’s similar. The second wife in this book, Helen Honeycutt, falls in love with Emmet Justice, a charismatic television journalist who has recently lost his wife in a tragic accident. Their sudden marriage creates a rift between new husband and his oldest friends, who resent Helen’s intrusion into their tightly knit circle. Hoping to mend fences, the newlyweds join Emmett’s group for a summer at the late wife’s family home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Helen soon falls under the spell not only of the little mountain town and its inhabitants, but also of Moonrise, her predecessor’s Victorian mansion, named for its unique but now sadly neglected nocturnal gardens. That spell, though, doesn’t work much magic; the harder Helen tries to fit into the town and Emmett’s circle, the more obvious it becomes that Helen will never measure up to the woman she replaced. Meanwhile, someone clearly aims to drive her away … but who? And why?