The Taker
BY: Alma Katsu
PUBLISHED BY: Gallery
PUBLISHED IN: 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9706-6
Pages: 456
After midnight, Dr. Luke Findley of St. Andrew, Maine gets an unusual patient, murder suspect Lanore MeIlvare. A young man’s body had been found in the nearby woods along with “Lanny”. As Luke attends to this young woman, who the police said looks “pale”, which is probably due to the cold Maine temperatures, Lanny begins to tell the doctor an unbelievable tale. The man’s body that is now in the morgue is none other than the body of Jonathan St. Andrew, which cannot be true as no St. Andrew has been alive for a few hundred years.
Pleading for Luke to help her escape, Lanny continues her story which starts in 1811 and talks about her admiration for the town founder’s son, Jonathan, despite her father’s and brother’s hatred for the St. Andrew family. You see St. Andrews were quite wealthy, while everyone else struggled to get by. Secretly, and despite being a few years younger, Lanny develops a friendship with Jonathan that later turns into a fling, one that results in her pregnancy. Lanny tries to hide her situation from her family. Jonathan becomes engaged to another very young girl, an arrangement made by his father. With nowhere else to turn, Lanny tells her parents of her pregnancy. Her father is furious and embarrassed. The decision is made that Lanny will be sent to Boston to live at a nunnery, in which the baby will be given up for adoption.