Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined; Rustication

Ten years since "Twilight" was first published! I can't believe it. Even though I didn't start reading them until 2007, it still doesn't seem like it was that long ago.
So for the tenth anniversary, instead of finishing "Midnight Sun" (it's okay, Stephenie, I forgive you), Stephenie Meyer decided to flip Twilight around a bit and published "Life and Death", in which the frail human is a boy named Beau and the vampire is a girl named Edythe. She contends that it works just as well with the gender switch, and while I don't totally agree, it was still a fun read. Beau is quite likeable and Edythe...well, she's Edythe. I wasn't expecting her to change *everyone's* genders (Jacob is now Julie, Esme is now Dr. Cullen, etc. The only ones who stayed the same were Charlie, Renee, and Phil), but hey, they're her characters and she can do what she likes.

I was expecting "Rustication" by Charles Palliser to be spookier than it was. Set in Victorian England, Richard is sent home from Cambridge, "rusticated", as it was called, for his behavior. Even though he doesn't come out and say it until 2/3 of the way through, it was easy to guess he was smoking opium. His good friend Edmund committed suicide with a letter Richard wrote him nearby, making it look like he might have had something to do with Edmund's death. So Richard joins his mother and older sister Effie in the house they had to move to after his father's death. It's a ramshackle affair, and they are so poor they can't even hire decent help.
Strange things are happening in the town: people are getting obscene letters threatening violence, then animals are being maimed. Richard suspects his sister is having an affair with the earl's nephew, who stands to inherit all his money, but when the nephew announces his engagement to another girl Effie is devastated. Richard threatens him at a Ball, and then the man turns up dead the next day. Richard manages to puzzle out that his mom and sister actually framed him for the letters, maimings, and murder to save his sister's reputation and manages to escape before the police can arrest him. I think Palliser wanted us to doubt Richard and think maybe he really *did* do it, but if that's what he wanted us to think it didn't really play out that way.