Tag: British settings

Book Review: The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh – a new promising new detective series in a moody North Wales setting

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I saw Clare Mackintosh’s name connected with fellow suspense/mystery author Lisa Jewell, and being a fan of Jewell, decided she should be worth a shot. Like Jewell, Mackintosh has written a bunch of twisty mysteries, but The Last Party is the first in a series featuring Welsh detective Ffion Morgan. I like being in at the start of a promising crime series, and was soon glad I’d picked this up.

The mystery starts with the discovery of a dead body by swimmers braving a New Year’s dip. We’re in the remote village of Cwm Coed on the shore of a lake which borders England. Across the water is a luxury resort called The Shore, built by a couple of investors as holiday homes for the wealthy. These incomers don’t support the village shops, they zip around the lake on jet skies and are just generally obnoxious. So it isn’t surprising that the corpse turns out to be one of the investors, a Rhys Lloyd.

With a name like that you’d assume the victim’s Welsh. And he is – a local made good in the sense he’s become a successful star of stage and screen, and knows how to turn on the charm. His mother still owns the hardware store in the village, and it was his father’s land that he and his partner Jonny Charlton have turned into The Shore. Their New Year’s Eve party was supposed to bring everybody together and appease the villagers, but it all ends in murder. The story soon throws up a fair few suspects – it turns out Rhys is struggling to pay off creditors and his charm hides a darker persona.

DC Ffion Morgan is on the spot – she’s local, still living with her mother and sister in Cwm Coed, but for all that she’s something of a lone ranger. She drives an old Triumph at tearaway speeds over the winding rural roads and has a burning secret. She’s also shocked to discover that her one-night stand from the night before is the English cop assigned to assist on the case.

DC Leo Bradey is an intelligent and promising police officer from Cheshire, with a whole lot of baggage. His ex-wife is going out of her way to exclude Leo from being a parent to their young son, whom he adores, and his boss makes him the butt of all his tasteless jokes. Working with Ffion doesn’t get off to a great start either, but they slowly form a team. They soon discover that hardly anybody doesn’t have a motive for killing Rhys Lloyd.

The Last Party is a much better than average murder mystery. Clare Mackintosh is a former police officer herself so the story has a ring of authenticity. However, there’s a lot more than police work here. Family dynamics, old scores and the effects of burying damaging secrets all add to a character-driven, atmospheric read, the evocative setting adding a ton of interest.

As well as the dangers of the lake, there’s snow to contend with and the story builds to a life-and-death climax that has you on the edge of your seat. This is helped by a plot that switches back and forwards in time and between characters, mostly Leo and Ffion but also the key players and suspects. I was fair racing through the chapters to see what happened next. And then there are the twists.

For a diverting crime read, The Last Party doesn’t put a foot wrong and introduces a fabulous pair of detectives I’ll be happy to meet again. I’ll happily give it four stars. A Game of Lies, the next Ffion Morgan mystery, is due to be released later this year.

Book Review: Impossible by Sarah Lotz – an original and quirky fantasy-romance

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I have to confess I nearly didn’t finish Sarah Lotz’s recent novel, Impossible (also marketed as The Impossible Us). The novel is largely email correspondence between two characters who meet accidentally when Nick sends a grumpy message to a customer who owes him money, and it somehow ends up in Bee’s (Rebecca’s) inbox. Bee’s dinner with a Tinder date isn’t going well and she distracts herself with flippant email banter with Nick.

The story of their romance is told largely in emails because, for mysterious reasons, the two seem doomed never to meet in person. At first they are separated by a train ride – Nick’s in Leeds; Bee in London. When they do decide to meet they discover they belong in alternate realities – how many versions of the world there are, they have no idea. But in Nick’s dimension the world has made huge inroads to solve climate change as well as some obvious political differences; Bee’s dimension is the world as we know it.

Being stranded in different versions of the world makes no sense to either of them, but Nick comes across an organisation called the Berenstains who have had dealings with this anomaly. Berenstains member Geoffrey provides some light relief, tasked with keeping an eye on Nick, and staking him out like someone from a comedy-spy movie. There are rules about the situation, in particular, no meddling with the versions of people you know from a reality that’s different from your own.

Nick and Bee are all set to break this rule, Bee hunting out the Nick in her reality, who happens to be a famous author. This is galling for the original Nick, who is a literary hack, ghost writing for authors with limited talent. Meanwhile Nick seeks out the version of Bee in his reality, a Becca with a child, the wife of a powerful businessman, which is equally perplexing. She has given up her fashion design career for a family, quite unlike Bee, who has a wedding dress make-over business. Bee worries that Becca is unfulfilled and could be in a controlling relationship.

The story lurches from one complication to another as Nick and Bee set out to overcome their cross-dimensional problem to find happiness. There are plenty of humorous scenes and weird and wonderful characters – Tweedy, the elderly County type, showing Nick how to use a gun; Magda and Jonas, Bee’s elderly neighbours who epitomise lifelong devotion as a couple; Erika, Nick’s no-nonsense Nordic landlady – among others.

And even if it did at first remind me of the movies You’ve Got Mail crossed with The Lake House, the story is still original and cleverly put together. And yet in the middle it seemed to drag for me. I think it was all those emails. I’ve read epistolary novels before and enjoyed them. But here there’s a lot of bad language, which I find tiresome, and the banter which Bee and Nick find so amusing wasn’t particularly amusing for me. I began not to care particularly whether Bee and Nick found happiness as I didn’t like them very much – it’s probably a generational thing. Two thirds through I was so desperate for some elegantly crafted writing I took a breather with some Jane Austen before going back in.

But I did go back in, because it is impossible not to want to know what happens in the end. And Sarah Lotz ties it all up well. She’s a seasoned screenwriter who obviously knows about plotting and this is her seventh novel. I can imagine Impossible would adapt well to the screen. Would I recommend it? Yes, probably, but with some reservations. It gets a fairly generous 3 stars from me.

Book Review: Miss Austen by Gill Hornby – the story of the famous writer’s sister

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

When Jane Austen died, she left thousands of letters sent to family and friends, of which many were destroyed by her sister, Cassandra. This is the Miss Austen of Gill Hornby’s novel. The story begins with the elderly Cassandra visiting the vicarage where her long-dead fiancé grew up, the home of her very dear and also departed friend Eliza.

Jane and Cassandra both wrote to Eliza, and Cassandra is sure there must be a cache of letters somewhere, full of heartfelt disclosures and secrets, as well as (knowing Jane) waspish comments about other family and acquaintances. It is imperative that Cassandra finds these before they are made public. Cassandra was the carer and confidante of Jane in life, and now, twenty years after her sister’s death, she wants to preserve her good name and not allow Jane to be the subject of speculation and gossip.

And so here she is at the vicarage where as a young woman, she farewelled her beloved Tom on a voyage to the Caribbean, a chance for him to win a living from his patron and secure the means for he and Cassandra to marry. Memories come flooding back and the story dips back in time to those early years and the promises she made to Tom before his departure.

Meanwhile Eliza’s daughter Isabella is rattling around in the vicarage with her grim but loyal servant Dinah, her father the vicar having recently died. Isabella has the job of finding somewhere else to live as well as packing up all the chattels and furnishings that have been a part of her life since childhood. But Cassandra is appalled to see that Isabella doesn’t seem to know how to begin, obviously so ground down by years with an autocratic and belittling father she has a complete lack of initiative.

So we have two story threads here: Cassandra’s efforts to encourage Isabella to find a house with her other spinster sisters – for what could be more pleasant than to live with sisters?; and the early years of Cassandra’s own life with her beloved Jane as revealed by the letters she finds.

I listened to Miss Austen as an audiobook read by Juliet Stevenson and if there is a Juliet Stevenson fan club out there, I should probably become a member because her reading is utterly superb. She brings to life the characters so well along with the nuances of tone in the writing, the conversations and voices of Jane and Cassandra, plus all the peripheral characters ,to recreate the Austen sisters’ world.

There are multiple characters – the girls had five brothers, plus friends and new acquaintances, which echo some of the themes and interactions from Jane Austen’s novels. Gill Hornby has done a really good job with this, and while there are many novels out there that pay homage to Jane Austen, mostly through further stories about some of her much-loved characters, this book about Cassandra is one of the better ones I’ve come across.

Of course we can’t expect a raft of happy endings here. Jane Austen didn’t live long, and the Austens struggled to find a permanent home after their father died. Neither Jane nor Cassandra ever married and there seems to have been both grief and a sense of missed opportunities over this. And yet, Hornby sneaks in a rather charming and amusing ending to the story, casting the truculent Dinah in a whole new light. Cassandra herself is wonderful company and as an elderly unmarried woman, a believable and refreshing heroine. Miss Austen is a four out of five read from me.

Book Review: Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson – a story from flapper era set in London’s seedy Soho

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I find it so easy to slip into a Kate Atkinson novel, whatever the storyline, because the writing is just so smart. In Shrines of Gaiety, the main focus of the story is the goings-on of a family of nightclub owners in 1920s London, overseen by the matriarch, Nellie Coker. A Scottish woman widowed young and with a family to support, she’s done a few dodgy things to make her fortune, intent not only on supporting her children, but advancing them in society.

We meet Nellie as she’s leaving after a short stint in Holloway, the London prison for women. One of her nightclubs had been raided and liquor found being sold on the premises. Usually she gets a tip-off from a policeman – Inspector Maddox from Bow Street police station – but not this time. Is Maddox still loyal? There’s someone else sniffing around – a gangland boss who’s keen to get his hands on a set of nightclubs and settle an old score.

Observing Nellie leaving Holloway is Chief Inspector Frobisher, the detective tasked with cleaning up Soho’s nightlife and the rot that has set in at Bow Street. With him is Gwendolen, a librarian from York who is on the hunt for two young girls who have run away to London to go on the stage. London has a habit of swallowing up young women and a few have been turning up dead, fished out of the Thames.

Gwendolen is an interesting character as she has the fortitude of someone who has nursed during the recent war, but post-war life has been a little tame, living in genteel poverty with her listless mother. When her mother dies, she discovers an inheritance which gives her the freedom to travel to London, where she can explore a new life. The missing girls set her off on a mission. Both Frobisher and Nellie Coker offer Gwendolen interesting opportunities.

As well as following Frobisher’s policing, and Gwendolen’s snooping, we meet the younger Cokers: eldest son Niven, who is battle hardened from the war, unflappable and smart. His sister Edith is Nellie’s natural successor, practical, though not as pretty as her sisters. But something has unhinged Edith lately. With their Cambridge education, Betty and Shirley are primed to marry into the aristocracy, though they also lend a hand with the clubs. Younger son Ramsay is rather effete and an easy victim of anyone trying to get at Nellie, but nevertheless has literary aspirations. Young Kitty at eleven suffers from neglect and is largely uneducated while no-one notices that she’s also in danger.

‘Give Mr Frazzini a box of chocolates, will you?’ Nellie said to Betty.

Nellie sold the boxes for fifteen shillings each but bought them wholesale from somewhere in the north for a shilling a box, all prettied up with ribbons (a penny each) by soldiers disabled in the war. The dance hostesses made a great fuss of persuading their partners to buy the boxes for them and then, after a few chocolates had been eaten, the boxes made their way back to the storeroom they’d come from and were refilled, ribbons adjusted, and sent out to be sold again.

The narrative bounces around all of them, as well as Freda and Florence, the two missing girls, creating a giddy plot that will keep you on your toes. I’ve heard this book described as Dickensian, and I suppose it is with its varied cast of characters, and the way the criminal element rubs shoulders with the law, the sudden reversals of fortune – there’s even a gang of women pickpockets. The story paints a picture of the mad excesses of the 1920s, the jazz and the flappers, the endless partying as everyone tries to forget the recent war.

I enjoyed this book enormously because the writing is lively and amusing and you really can’t guess what will happen next. The situation looks dire for the stray women caught up in the seamy side of Soho, but even those with money can lose everything on the turn of a card. Help and goodness are in short supply but come from unexpected quarters. I chuckled my way through the book at some points; nervous for particular characters at others. At the end of the book, Atkinson gives potted histories of what happens next to all the major players, which may please or annoy some readers I confess to being a little annoyed but it’s still a four out of five stars read from me.

Book Review: Mother’s Boy by Patrick Gale – an imagined life of Cornwall’s favourite poet

~ Judith ~ 5 Comments

I’ve read a ton of novels by Patrick Gale – I love his writing for its warmth, perception and the characters. They’re always shown with all their flaws, and yet they make for oddly likeable company. Gale reveals what makes them them interesting and ordinary at the same time.

Like Charles Causley, Cornwall’s favourite poet – the subject of the latest Gale book, Mother’s Boy. The story takes us back to the early part of the twentieth century, and the courtship of Causley’s parents, both of them working in service: Laura as a maid in a small household and Charlie who drives a pony and trap for a local doctor. They marry while World War I is getting up steam and see little of each other for years. Charles is born in 1917, his father shipped home eventually, but with TB.

The story clips along through the years, with chapters about Charles’s early life as a boy in Launceston while his father is still alive, school life and his knack for language, a talent for the piano and his discovery of poetry. There are two unlikely friendships, the butcher’s boy who once bullied him and Ginger, the annoying boy who followed him around and listened outside as Charles practised on the piano. His mother’s thrill to find Charles a safe job at a desk; Charles’s disappointment that he won’t be continuing his education.

Then another war, and Charles’s acceptance into the navy as a coder. There are several chapters that progress the war, and Charles’s romantic connection with two men. Each chapter shows a new discovery or aspect of the war through key events or changes to Charles’s life, the novel finishing a few years after the war.

Parallel to Charles’s story is Laura’s, working away at her little laundry business, her days ruled by the weather and the rigid timetable required to get it all done. Her love for Charles is a constant. Fortunately for Laura, the ache of missing Charles while he is away at war is tempered by the evacuees she takes on, the Americans setting up bases around the town and later the prisoners of war who inhabit one base once the soldiers have headed across to France.. So we get an interesting glimpse of the war at home.

And while she suffered, Charles was either out at his play-reading group or rehearsing with his dance band or drinking beer with friends, or else he was shut in his room, stabbing away at his typewriter or listening intently to the radio, as often not to some programme about the international situation and politics, which made her head spin if she tried to follow it, and telling her to knit more quietly.

The two main characters are so nicely drawn, so empathetic, that you feel you know them well. Charles is refined and educated, a lover of good theatre and literature, his working class mother often bemused by the things he says. The story ambles along through the years with sudden events that make you really feel for mother and son; some happy moments but also the tragedies that you’d expect because of the war.

You get a strong sense of what it was like to be born different, both artistic as well as gay in a time and place when such things were problematic; and yet Charles manages to be true to himself in a way that works for him. But at what cost? The story pulls you along, each chapter adding something new on both an intimate scale as well as within the wider world. I thought I’d close the book and think, yes that was an interesting read and very true to its subject matter. And then wham! The final scene, in its quiet living room setting, quite blew me away. There was a lump in my throat. There were tears.

Patrick Gale’s novels often have a way of creeping up behind you, leaving you a little stunned, but in a nice way. His author’s notes reveal that Causely was often asked why he hadn’t written a full memoir, not just the few autobiographical fragments that remained after his death in 2003. Causley’s reply was that it was all there in the poems. The poem Angel Hill, quoted in full at the end of the book, could be a case in point and ties in beautifully with Gale’s novel, particularly that final scene.

Mother’s Boy is a stand-out novel by an accomplished writer whose work never disappoints. If you like this book, it is worth checking out the author’s notes on his website wihich add detail and some interesting photos. You can tell that Charles Causley has become close to his heart, and Laura too. I love books where you feel the author has poured his heart into a story. I feel this is the case here and why it gets a five out of five from me.

Book Review: The Homes by J B Mylet – a gripping Scottish orphanage mystery

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

At the back of the book, J B Mylet explains how he was inspired to write this novel by his mother’s own experiences as a child in an institution very like the one in The Homes. As a young girl she thought all children were brought up in similar set-ups: a cluster of houses in a purpose-built of village with twenty or thirty children per cottage with ‘house parents’ and a cook to feed them all. She didn’t realise that most children grew up with their biological families.

And at first it’s the same for Lesley, sharing a room with five other girls, including her best friend, Jonesy, all about the same age. But now she’s twelve, she knows better. She at least gets regular visits from her grandmother, who though kindly, is unable to care for Lesley, and neither can her mother who visits a few times a year. Lesley is bitter about her mother and finds it difficult to believe her when her mother says she’s hoping to bring her home to live with her one day. Jonesy is there is because the state has considered her mother an unsuitable parent.

There are other rooms in Lesley’s house with more girls of different ages and in charge are the Patersons, a childless couple who do their best. But Mr Paterson is not above taking his belt to the girls, in fact it’s expected. Jonesy gets it more than most. She’s just so lively and unstoppable. And everyone is terrified of the Superintendent, Mr Gordon. Jonesy’s non-stop chatter is a foil to Lesley’s quieter intelligence. Meanwhile Lesley escapes into her studies, one of the few children who bus to a local school.

Fears of punishments and schoolyard bullies all fade into the background when an older girl, Jane Denton, goes missing, her murdered body found some days later. When another girl disappears, Jonesy determines to find out who the murderer is, while Lesley acts as a sounding board and is dragged into Jonesy’s sleuthing, throwing the girls into danger. What follows is a fairly classic mystery with plenty of secrets and hidden motives.

And while this is entertaining, it is the characters of the girls, especially Lesley’s narrative voice, sensitive and smart but also easily led down blind alleys, that make the story interesting. That and the strikingly original setting. It’s difficult to forget that these are vulnerable children who deserve so much better. Fortunately not all the adults are unsympathetic. Eadie is the kindly therapist who listens and offers advice; there’s a friendly detective and Lesley gets help just in the nick of time from an unexpected quarter.

The Homes makes for a compelling story, part mystery, part social commentary, that will have you riveted until the last page. But the story behind the story is just as interesting. I wonder what Mylet will come up with next. This book gets a four out of five from me.

Book Review: Meredith, Alone by Claire Alexander: a compelling story about a life spent indoors

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

It takes some skill to turn the life of an agoraphobic person into an interesting novel. But I was soon hooked by the story of Meredith who hasn’t left her house in 1214 days – that’s three years and three months. Something has happened to Meredith to leave her traumatised and solitary, something which has cut her off from her mother and sister Fiona, once her closest pal. The story weaves in the past with the present as we follow Meredith’s struggles to get out into the world again.

Meredith has made her home a haven with restful colours and orders everything she needs online. She works online as a freelance writer so she really has no need to go anywhere. It just shows you how easy it is to cut yourself off from the outside world if want to. She has her cat, Fred, and her best friend Sadie calls in regularly with her two young children so although the book is called Meredith, Alone, she still has people in her court.

Meredith has support from a group online, StrengthInNumbers, where she makes friends with Celeste and talks to a counsellor, Diane, who conducts regular online sessions. We catch up with Meredith when she has a new visitor – Paul, from Holding Hands. He drops in on Thursdays to make sure Meredith is OK. Paul has his own struggles, and is in between careers. The two become friends over jigsaw puzzles.

I have my fingers on the door handle. Diane and I decided that I would count backwards from twenty. When I reach five, I’ll open the door. By the count of one, I’ll have both feet on my front doorstep. I’ll take five steps down my path, then I’ll go back inside.
It feels good to have a plan.

The book charts Meredith’s attempts to leave her house, which spurs the book onwards, day by day. It also dives back into the past to reveal Meredith’s terrible childhood and the event that drove her indoors. It takes a while for the reader to get all the information you need for her situation to make sense. Without a varied setting, the plot relies on Meredith’s story to drive it along, the slow revelations and your eagerness for her recovery. And it works.

Meredith is good company – smart and for all that’s going on in her life, she keeps herself busy to avoid drowning in the miseries of her plight. The novel has a lot to say about all the pain people hide away from each other, the things that derail marriages and cut family ties. How you cover it up and carry on as best you can. Until you just can’t. But the book never feels weighed down by all this.

Reading Meredith, Alone so soon after Paper Cup, which I thought utterly brilliant, was probably not such a good idea. Both are connected by Glasgow and have main characters with mental health issues and who have broken off from their families. But these novels are very different in feel and Meredith, Alone has very little to suggest its wider setting, apart from the odd reference to Irn Bro. It’s no fault of this novel if it comes off as second best – it’s still a great read and Meredith a great character. It will make you think. So it’s a four out of five read from me.

Book Review: The Driftwood Girls by Mark Douglas-Home – a twisty mystery involving fiction’s favourite oceanographer

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I’d almost forgotten how much I’d enjoyed the previous ‘sea detective’ mysteries and so this book almost slipped under my radar. It’s been a while since The Malice of Waves, Douglas-Home’s previous novel about his beleaguered oceanographer sleuth. Cal McGill runs a small business out of his Edinburgh flat, mapping ocean currents for clients who are missing things – often loved ones – lost at sea. He has pictures of flotsam and jetsam on a pinboard that dominates his living/working space, some of them rather grisly. So yes, he’s an odd sort.

It’s not unusual for him to find himself in a tight spot and at the start of The Driftwood Girls everything seems to be going wrong. After talking to an elderly man who looked set to jump from a bridge, the news media have labelled him as the bad guy when the old fellow disappears. Clients have dropped him like a hot potato and he’s almost out of cash. Then he learns that his old uni friend Alex is dying and is called to make good a promise to bury him in the middle of Alex’s favourite lake, which being illegal, will have to be done post-burial and under cover of darkness.

Out of the blue, Cal is contacted by Kate Tolmie, desperate to find her sister Flora who left a mysterious note with Cal’s name on it. Twenty-years before Kate and Flora’s mother disappeared off the coast of France when she was due to return to her family via ferry. The disappearance was big news at the time but no clues have ever come to light. Kate also hopes Cal can find out what happened to her mother, and there’s a personal connection too. Flora was Alex’s fiancée.

The story switches to Texel, an island holiday spot in the Netherlands, where the body of a young English girl lost at sea washed up, also twenty-three years ago. Here her old school-mate Sarah has made her home, guilt-ridden for not being a better friend. Of course, only Cal can make the connection. And what’s the connection to the death of a beggar at an Edinburgh train station, stabbed in an adjacent alley. All clues point to Kate Tolmie being the killer but DS Helen Jamieson isn’t so sure.

Helen is the other great thing about these books. She, like Cal, is an awkward character, not getting on with her colleagues because of her need to examine all the facts to ensure the right person is put away. Imagine that! Her IQ is off the chart and she’s got a massive crush on Cal. The two have become friends over several cases, but Cal is a terrible person to be friends with as he disappears for months at a time and doesn’t keep in touch.

Friendship is a recurring theme throughout the book – the awkward friendship between Cal and Helen, Cal’s sporadic memories of time spent with Alex, and their friend Olaf. There’s Sarah and her elegant French neighbour, as well as her memories of lost friend Ruth. Friendship has its obligations which can cause strain as much as it enriches people and we can see that here. Then there are all those secrets. Cal is in for a few surprises about the old pals he lost touch with and it is fortunate that Helen is investigating as she helps connect the dots.

This is a lovely twisty read with some really evocative coastal settings that add a ton of atmosphere. You get enough of the science of oceanography for it to add interest without weighing the story down. Mark Douglas-Home deftly weaves together all the plot threads – and there are a few of them – in a way that keeps you up reading to see what happens. All in all it’s a very satisfying mystery, but I hope we won’t have to wait too long before Cal’s next investigation. A four out of five read from me.

Book Review: The Fell by Sarah Moss – an empathetic and gripping story of the pandemic

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

The Fell reads a bit like several interwoven stories, each from the perspective of a different character. The single day setting of the book gives it more of a short-story feel, in that you only get glimpses of the past while the immediate future is left up in the air. This concentrates the tension of what happens when Kate goes for a walk and seems to disappear.

The story is set in a small town in the Pennines where Kate lives with her son Matt and they’re just scraping by. Kate works as a waitress and she does a bit of pub singing, but that’s all come to a halt since a contact at work has become ill with the Covid virus and she’s forced to take a couple of weeks off and to isolate at home.

This is hard for Kate as she’s a keen walker. She’s up on the paths into the wilderness near her home normally every day. She loves nature and living her life with care for the environment. As we meet her, she’s running out of money and there’s not much in the cupboards, certainly not a lot to feed a hungry fifteen-year-old. The house always seems to be cold adding to the sense of times being tough. So you can’t blame Kate for escaping her worries in a fit of desperation and striding up the path to the fell. She only plans a quick walk before dark, but something happens and she doesn’t return.

The story flips from Kate’s character to Matt’s, a caring kid who worries about his mum. As time goes by, he is torn between phoning for help and the fear that his mother would be in terrible trouble. She could face a huge fine they can ill afford, so the hours tick by and Matt waits. He hesitatingly visits next door where Alice is also finding things tough.

Recently widowed, Alice has dinner with her daughter via Skype, but since her battle with cancer, her daughter never stops pestering her about her health. Even though Alice is on her own, it’s like someone is always peering over her shoulder, making her feel guilty about baking all those cookies and not taking better care of herself. She misses her friends and trips to town, stuck at home because of her age and vulnerable health.

The fourth narrator is emergency rescue responder Rob. Now divorced, he should be at home with his teenage daughter – it’s his rostered weekend. But when the call comes through that a walker’s gone missing, he knows his duty is to the missing woman. Kate has a teenager at home too – probably worried sick. Imagine if that was his daughter. He’s torn but it’s a life and death situation – with chilly November temperatures, hypothermia could be fatal if they don’t find Kate soon.

Moss has created four very believable and empathetic characters in a situation many of us will recognise. This is the first book I’ve read that where the Covid pandemic as a key part of the story, not just an interesting background. She conjures up the anxiety, isolation and insecurity felt by many during those difficult times. And also the obsessiveness: the bread baking and the sanitising of groceries.

You get the sense that everyone is battling themselves – to say nothing of social media shaming – doing the right thing on the one hand while desperate for some relief on the other. Some tiny treat. I remember that feeling well. Whether it’s just getting out of your house, playing computer games or eating cookies for dinner.

The Fell’s a short book, and you plough through the pages to see what happens next. I would have liked at least an epilogue to see if all that worry was justified and because I felt so invested in the characters I wanted a little bit of optimism for them. Something for them to look forward to. But this is a perfectly pared down story, and those focussed anxieties don’t let up until the end.

The Fell is also one of those books where there are no quotation marks, which kind of works, adding to that stream of consciousness narration, and I did get used to it. Eventually. The chapter headings are all lower case, which makes them oddly emphatic. But all this vanishes as you read, because of your connection with the characters. If it isn’t too soon for you to read a Covid novel, give this one a go. At the end of the day, it’s just a darn good story – and a four out of five read from me.

Book Review: Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase – secrets and lies in an evocative Cornish setting

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I love these novels set in old English country houses, specially when family secrets, heartbreak and mystery are added to the mix. Old houses can add a Gothic quality, as it is with Black Rabbit Hall, although that’s not the house’s real name. Pencraw’s a dilapidated mansion on the Cornish coast, subject to storms and heady summer heat and it’s the home to the Alton family when they’re not in London.

The young Altons are a blessed with loving parents – beautiful Nancy who hails from New York, and Hugo who is struggling to maintain the old house, with its leaky roof and unreliable floorboards. The couple are devoted to each other, and adore their kids: little Kitty, nature-loving Barney, fifteen-year-old Toby and his twin sister Amber who narrates most of the story. Their world comes crumbling down when Nancy dies suddenly in a riding accident, and the children become more wild and unkempt.

Amber does her best to fill in as a mother figure to the two younger children while Toby acts more weirdly than ever. He has a fixation with what to do if civilisation comes to an end – it’s 1968 and the Cold War and the nuclear arms race are all go. He’s a survivalist but not in a good way and argues constantly with his father. It doesn’t come as a surprise when Hugo invites an old flame to visit but it’s a shock when she arrives with her seventeen-year-old son, Lucien. Caroline is the opposite of their warm, spontaneous mother, but she’s got money and might just save Black Rabbit Hall.

The story flips between Amber’s narration and Lorna’s some thirty odd years later. Lorna and her fiancé Jon are looking for a wedding venue, and Amber has a distant memory of visiting Black Rabbit Hall as a child with her mother. There is an emotional pull here for Lorna as her mother has recently died, lacing the memory with nostalgia. Finding the house almost defeats them, but it’s also a shock when they get there and it seems the Hall is not quite ready for hosting weddings, despite what the website says.

Jon and Amber look set to fall out over the Hall, Amber still excited about finding the perfect setting for the wedding, Jon more realistic having noticed the general state of disrepair. Then there is the lack of staff, the house inhabited by the frail and elderly Mrs Alton and Dill, her flustered general factotum. Amber is talked into visiting for a weekend to help make up her mind – no pressure! What she experiences when she’s at the Hall is more about disturbing distant memories and uncovering family secrets that giving the place a trial run. What is it about Black Rabbit Hall that seems to prod deep into her consciousness?

The story slowly comes together as we go back through the years to fill in the gaps as the Alton children have to deal with family upheaval while still grieving for Nancy. Lorna also teases out hints from the past which make her doubt her future with Jon. In each narrative there is a gathering storm and sense of impending doom, which has you galloping through the book to find out what happens. It all comes to a startling and intense ending but there is resolution as well.

For me the book had hints of Daphne du Maurier, not only with the Cornish setting, but with the cruel, Mrs Danvers-like malefactor and the Gothic qualities of the house. Chase also does a great job with the family dynamics, particularly the way she writes about siblings and the intense connections between the twins, the pressure on the older sister to keep things together and the difficulty for her to be her own person.

Black Rabbit Hall is the perfect read if you like old country house mysteries and evocative settings. The characters are easy to empathise with, honestly they break your heart, and there is an interesting dichotomy between long summer days where nothing seems to happen and events hurtling characters into rash behaviour. This is my second Eve Chase novel – I’d previously enjoyed The Wilding Sisters – and it didn’t disappoint. I’ll be heading back for more. Black Rabbit Hall (which incidentally won the Saint Maur en Poche prize for best foreign fiction) gets a four out of five from me.