Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition (Initial Situation): Roland Mitchell and the Search for the Holy Grail
Possession's exposition really gets the action started quickly. While doing some research in the London Library, Roland Mitchell stumbles upon potentially life-changing documents: two drafts of a letter that the celebrated nineteenth-century poet Randolph Henry Ash wrote to an unnamed woman. As Roland attempts to discover the letter's addressee—and to figure out if Ash ever actually sent the letter he'd drafted—Roland draws fellow scholar and gorgeous ice queen Maud Bailey into a thrilling quest for academic treasure.
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication): Fatal Attraction
The action starts to heat up when Roland and Maud discover a whole bundle of letters that R. H. Ash exchanged with fellow nineteenth-century poet Christabel LaMotte. As Roland and Maud trace their predecessors' love affair piece by piece and step by step, their own relationship starts to take a decidedly romantic turn. Meanwhile, their friends and colleagues are starting to catch a whiff of the mystery, and some very curious eyes begin to follow Maud and Roland's movements.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point): It Was a Dark and Stormy Night…
Things come to a head when Roland and Maud run out of clues to chase down and realize at the same that their private quest has become a very public affair. When a colleague learns that the delightfully villainous Mortimer Cropper has decided to dig up Ash's grave to find secret documents that were buried with him, Roland and Maud unite with a company of heroic allies (okay, fellow academics, a lawyer, and Roland's ex-girlfriend) to thwart Mortimer Cropper's plan.
In an epic showdown in a rural English graveyard, they succeed.
Falling Action: The Mummy Returns
Possession's falling action has a mini-climax of its own. Up to this point, the novel's twentieth-century characters have figured out that R. H. Ash and Christabel LaMotte conceived a child together, but they've found no clues as to whether the child lived or died. Now, as all of our heroes gather together to examine the contents of the box that Mortimer Cropper stole from Ash's grave, they discover Christabel's last letter to Randolph, and its contents Blow Their Minds.
As they learn, Maud's great-great-grandmother Maia Thomasine Bailey wasn't actually Christabel LaMotte's niece, as Maud and everyone else in her family once thought. Turns out, Maia Thomasine was the daughter of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash.
Resolution (Denouement): Tying Up Loose Ends and Taking Names
By the end of the novel, the twentieth-century characters have every reason to believe that Ash never learned that he had a daughter. We readers get to know better, as the novel ends with a Postscript that takes us back to a sunny day in May 1868, where Randolph has the great good fortune of coming across the eight-year-old Maia Thomasine playing in a field.
Randolph recognizes his daughter, and the two of them get a few minutes of quality father-daughter bonding time before they say goodbye. Aww.