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Following the death of her elderly father, opera singer Lila du Cann (a stage-name reinvention of her original name, Eliza Duncan) returns to Burnhead, the gray, rainy, dreary Scottish town of her childhood to arrange for his funeral and to put his affairs in order. As she sorts through boxes of old papers and props stored in the attic of the damp house, Lila's mind travels back decades to 1960, her fifteenth summer, when her ordinary life --- and the lives of those around her --- were turned upside down.
Eliza's mother Florrie (stage name Fleur), whose own dreams of opera stardom were dashed when she got pregnant, has never forgiven her husband for robbing her of a career and of misrepresenting his own career prospects (he trained as a lawyer but, due to serving time in prison, was unable to practice law). During her childhood, Eliza's parents bicker constantly --- about their run-down house, about money, about everything. When domestic life becomes too much for Eliza's mother, she retreats into her music room, listening endlessly to recordings of Puccini's opera Turandot.
Through a mildly comic misunderstanding, Eliza leads some of the townspeople to believe that an amateur production of Turandot is in the works. When Eliza's beloved uncle George, a music teacher, is called up from London to rescue Florrie from a nervous breakdown, he impulsively suggests that such a production is actually feasible. George discovers that Eliza can sing, finds a venue (an unused barn), recruits chorus members, musicians and stagehands, and prepares to put on a show.
The central characters of the opera will be played by Eliza's mother and one of George's music students from London, Joe Foscari, who comes up to Burnhead as a special favor to George. Joe --- with his Italian name, sophisticated way of speaking and London address --- is a hopelessly romantic figure to naïve young Eliza, who falls headlong into her first crush. At first the attraction seems fairly innocent --- Eliza fusses about her clothing, imagines the couple's first kiss and daydreams about their romance. But as her visions of a shared future with Joe grow more and more serious (even though they have no basis in reality), Eliza's crush borders on obsession and sets in motion a series of events that will destroy the lives of those around her.
Told in chapters that alternate between a third-person account of the events of the Turandot summer and Lila's own first-person narration of her present attempts to sort through her father's documents, the novel gradually intertwines these perspectives, illustrating not only the unresolved emotions that still haunt Lila but also the extent to which those emotions have deeply damaged her, even decades later.
Morag Joss's character-driven narrative becomes fascinating once the cast of characters is fully introduced. It takes a while for the novel to gain momentum toward its ultimate goal, but once rehearsals for Turandot are underway, readers will be drawn in by the series of events that march, inexorably, toward the inevitable resolution. Framed by the storyline of Puccini's opera, PUCCINI'S GHOSTS is simultaneously a captivating (and even, at times, surprisingly humorous) behind-the-scenes account of a doomed theatrical production as well as an in-depth psychological portrait by one of our most promising new suspense authors.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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