About the Book
February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, spying on their surroundings in the gilt mirrors and perfectly polished tableware, while the hotel’s red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.
In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn’t see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she’s determined not to let her out of her sight.
But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur and Nora will find herself face to face with a past she thought she had long left behind…
Format: eARC (336 pages) Publisher: Apollo
Publication date: 8th June 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Horror
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My Review
Based on the blurb, and the first few chapters of the book, you might be forgiven for thinking you were about to read a ‘Golden Age’ mystery so you will be surprised – as I was – to find yourself embarking on a quite different journey into something dark and macabre. The author’s debut novel The Psychology of Time Travel, which I read in 2018, had elements of mind-bending fantasy but Hokey Pokey takes the reader into the realm of horror. It becomes clear that evil stalks the Regent Hotel.
Part one of the book introduces us to Nora who, as well as being a psychoanalyst, has a remarkable ‘gift’ but one which can be used for good or ill. (No prizes for guessing which in this case.) The origin of this gift the reader learns more about in part two of the book which takes us back to Nora’s childhood and has a fairytale quality reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm allied with a real sense of the macabre. Although set in a village near Birmingham, Nora’s home deep in the woods wouldn’t be out of place in Transylvania. This section includes a particularly gruesome scene which, if you’re squeamish, you may find disturbing although I guess no more than watching one of Shakespeare’s more bloody plays.
Part three of the book fills in more of the background to Nora’s mission and her rather disturbing motivation for embarking on it whilst the final section of the book provides just about everything fans of Gothic horror could desire. Personally, if I’d known what was in store I’d have checked out of the Regent Hotel soon after arrival.
I received an advance review copy courtesy of Head of Zeus via NetGalley.
In three words: Dark, macabre, fantastical
Try something similar: Ghosts of the West by Alec Marsh
About the Author
Kate Mascarenhas is a part-Irish, part-Seychellois midlander. Since 2017, Kate has been a chartered psychologist. Before that she worked as a copywriter, a doll’s house maker and a bookbinder. She lives in the Midlands with her husband in a small terraced house which she is gradually filling with Sindy dolls. She is the author of two other novels, The Psychology of Time Travel and The Thief on the Winged Horse.
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What Cathy Read Next... 
Oh… ah… well, then… despite the initial positive reaction to the title and cover, I don’t think this one is for me.
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It really was rather strange. Looking at other reviews, including on NetGalley, I wasn’t alone in being surprised at the direction it took.
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