THE SEVEN RINGS

A trilogy about a haunted house in Maine meanders to a close.

In the first two books of the Lost Brides trilogy, Roberts introduced readers to Sonya MacTavish, a Boston graphic designer with a cheating fiancé. Then, an uncle Sonya didn’t know existed, a man named Collin Poole, died and left her a gorgeous mansion on the coast of Maine. Sonya and her best friend, Cleo Fabares, moved into the house, only to discover it was haunted by the spirit of a 19th-century witch named Hester Dobbs. Starting in 1806, Dobbs murdered generation after generation of women who married into the Poole family, using the wedding rings of the murdered women as talismans that help her consolidate her power over the mansion. The ghosts of the seven murdered brides and other people killed by Dobbs also inhabit the house, and they want to help Sonya and Cleo, along with Sonya’s lover, Trey Doyle, and her cousin Owen Poole, in their quest to exorcise Dobbs from the property and keep her from killing again. Unfortunately, as this plot was well-established in the first two books of the series, there’s little left for Sonya and her cadre of pals to do. Sonya and Cleo spend much of their time cleaning out the attic and basement rooms, finding clues and information about the dead women. This feels like filler, with repetitive and boring scenes that offer only dribs and drabs of information about the family and the house's history, but do little to illuminate anything new or interesting about Sonya or Hester Dobbs as her nemesis. The plotting is glacially slow until the final battle, which the author rushes to the point of being underwritten.

A promising series ends not with a bang, but a whimper.