The House at Riverton

Do you believe in the kind of altruism that would cause a person to give up her own happiness in order to serve another and never even tell that other person what she'd done?  Can you possibly believe in a nineteenth-century female character who would make plans to run away with the love of her life and then shoot him because she thought he was threatening her sister?  If so, have I got a shaggy dog story of a novel for you!

The House at Riverton, by Kate Morton, is intriguingly structured, with the story of what happened to the narrator's employers told at the end of their former housemaid's life.  And some of the dialogue is fun:
"I'm tired of reciting The Lady of Shalott while she snivels into her handkerchief."
"She's crying for her own lost love," Emmeline said with a sigh.
Hannah rolled her eyes.
"It's true!" Emmeline said. "I heard Grandmama tell Lady Clem. Before she came to us, Miss Prince was engaged to be married."
"Came to his senses, I suppose," Hannah said.
"He married her sister instead," Emmeline said.
This silenced Hannah, but only briefly. "She should have sued him for breach of promise."
"That's what Lady Clem said--and worse--but Grandmama said Miss Prince didn't want to cause him trouble."
"Then she's a fool," Hannah said. "She's better off without him."
"What a romantic," David said archly. "The poor lady's hopelessly in love with a man she can't have and you begrudge reading her the occasional piece of sad poetry. Cruelty, thy name is Hannah."
But, as in this passage, the foreshadowing is unrelentingly heavy-handed.  Yes, these sisters will end up quarreling over the same man! Surprise!

The writing only occasionally takes on the flavor of the early twentieth century, with bits of odd nineteenth-century tone completely pulling me out of the story:
"It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation."

In the end, what happens is simply unbelievable. People do not act like this, no matter how much the narrator protests that they were different back then.  I felt cheated that I had actually read more than 400 pages, only to have such a wildly improbable ending thrust upon me.  It was like listening to one of those shaggy dog stories that goes on and on and then has a stupid ending, and you discover that the only funny thing is that you actually listened to that nonsense for so long.