I would like to thank Raven Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Raven Books

Published – Out Now

Price - £12.99 hardcover £6.23 Kindle eBook

Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft’s family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken.

But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed; he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home.

Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralysed and almost entirely mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try and escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers that her new home may be just as dangerous as her last.

The phrase haunting in horror has a very clear definition but being haunted is not necessarily always to mean that the supernatural ghosts of the undead are pursuing you. Sometimes we are haunted by the mistakes we cannot erase and their repercussions.  Some memories are always going to continually rise up in our minds with the threat of overwhelming us.  In some myths it’s when we have those kind of thoughts that various entities may decide to play with you to their own ends. In Laura Purcell’s excellent tale of gothic horror and mystery these two ideas are woven into a gripping; uncomfortable and loss.

On a dark winter night in Victorian England we meet Hester Why travelling towards a new role and escaping her past and drinking her sorrows away in a hidden gym flask. But when she sees a fellow passenger critically injured, she is forced to call attention to herself and we find that Hester really wants to avoid attention – so much so that she isn’t even using her real name as she travels to her new employer using forged references.  We soon find that Hester comes from London society where the nouveau rich and the establishment are crossing paths at the high end of society.  Now she has been forced to swap this for gloomy and cold Morvoren House in Cornwall in winter with frost on the windows and snow in the air. Awaiting her is a new household where the owner Miss Pincroft is a mute spinster confined to a chair staring terrified at her collection of bone china.

This is a fascinating story and Purcell really keeps the reader guessing as to what exactly is going on. Our impressions of characters shift throughout. Hester starts as a hero in our eyes saving a man’s life but then we see she is a much more complex character desperate for attention or possibly redemption. Miss Pinecroft is a passive yet alarming figure seeming to want to talk to Hester but in a parallel plot set forty years earlier we see her as young woman Louise working with her father to find a cure for consumption. Louise’s family has been torn apart by this allegedly incurable disease; she’s bright; brave and keen to help her father make a medical breakthrough. Clearly something happened to transform her into the mute and placid woman we now see but what or who caused it? The novel is divided into several parts bouncing between Hester and Miss Pinecroft’s present and future. They do slightly mirror each other in their intelligence; sense of purpose and loyalty towards in Hester’s case her previous mistress and in Louise’s case her father a renowned physician trying to save his reputation. 

I loved the way that this story was constructed not simply to be a psychological tale of two very damaged characters running away from their pasts; but that Purcell also makes us see the two leads as both outsiders treading into an older wilder world where perhaps something supernatural is lurking. Here they are now in a place that believes in the little folk; changelings and protective spells. For Hester her nemesis is Miss Pinecroft’s oldest servant Creeda who is keen to maintain all the old traditions particularly any based around Miss Pinecroft’s mysterious adopted ward who appears to be a child in a grown woman’s body. Hester the daughter of a doctor and a midwife finds her worldviews clash with the stories of the little people who wish them all ill. But something is opening their mistress’s locked door every night and is something hiding on the shelves of China?  Purcell has a fantastic approach to slowly building a foreboding sense of atmosphere be it on the strange shoreline or the gothic house at night.  A candle simply being blow out is made far more powerful and unsettling than any masked monster! There is a growing sense of unease in both women’s stories pointing towards something terrible that is going to happen that will shatter these women’s lives and the repercussions of the past are going to affect Hester’s future.

This is definitely a novel that the less you know as you come into it the better the reveal of these characters will be for you. Part of the fun/terror here is discovering secrets and what exactly are the relationships between these women.  Is there anything to these legends or not? You will care about these characters and fear for their safety and suffer their losses. I’ve been meaning to read Laura Purcell for a while now and a book of just terrifying unease makes me want to hurry up and devour all of their other novels.  Perfect night-time reading just ensure you lock the door.