Ella Maud by Nicholas Nicastro: A Gripping Mystery Snatched from 19th-20th Century Life

     Ella Maude by Nicholas Nicastro is a mystery thriller that gripped me from the first page until the last.  This book contained subtle plot twists which kept the mystery moving, and me as reader immersed and trying to figure out where it was all going.  Characterization and scene settings are well drawn.  Whether it was an author oversight, intended or my lack of comprehension, not until well into the book that did I realize exactly who Ella Maude was.
     Nell Copsey disappeared around midnight on November 1901.  The scenarios around her disappearance and subsequently realized death make the mystery.  The Prologue sets the tone and draws the reader in by describing what Nell’s sister  Ollie becomes at the culmination of the action.         Nell’s disappearance and death are like tossing a pebble into water; none of the main characters escape misery and havoc in their lives. Nell was her mother’s favorite and in the North Carolina town of Elizabeth, she was perceived as being an ideal of womanhood, sort of a will ‘o the wisp.  Readers find in the last chapter that Nell really was an amusing tease and flirt.