Last night, ten to fifteen minutes of light pre-bed reading turned into an hour and a half of obsessive page turning. Today, even in daylight, my own victorian house feels creepy and weird. I blame the San Francisco fog.

A quick précis of the plot: Noemí's father gets a concerning letter from her newlywed cousin Catalina. He dispatches Noemí to visit her and investigate, and so she treks to rural Hidalgo and Catalina's new home, a ramshackle decaying old-money mansion owned by the local mining family. Our mystery starts with "what's wrong with Catalina?", and quickly spirals into "what's wrong with this house?" and "what's wrong with this family?"

Every line in this novel is building something: either putting a new brick into the wall of its immersive setting, or bringing the main character Noemí to life, or putting her into jeopardy. The creepy, ramshackle old mansion that's at the heart of this story is a character in its own right. I can vividly imagine this tiny postcolonial mining town, and the mist and the trees and even the mushrooms that dot the cemetery.

And the end result of all that methodical construction is a novel that really holds together. I was trying to figure out what was going on with Catalina right alongside Noemí. As the tension built, I felt it in my shoulders and neck. And then I was caught flat-footed and slack-jawed by the plot, which is how I wound up spending my evening and early morning reading when I really ought to have been asleep.

One tiny, final observation that needs to be hidden behind a spoiler tag: I already didn't like mushrooms.