A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

In 1907, wealthy Wisconsin businessman, Ralph Truitt puts an ad in a Chicago paper looking for "a reliable wife". Young Catherine Land answers the ad and adopts the persona of a respectable daughter of deceased missionary parents. Nobody is telling the truth and though both have a plan neither anticipates the direction their duplicity will take them. What is true is the desperate nature of the lives of people in the frozen north of Wisconsin. The detail of place is a strength of the story as is the ability of Goolrick to send the readers sympathies in the wrong direction. It is a Gothic tale where the grey of the moors has been exchanged for a landscape of such blinding whiteness than both sanity and sensibility are lost in its frozen glare.