Tag: historical fiction

#BlogTour #BookReview Blackstone Fell by Martin Edwards

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BLOG TOUR BANNER_BFWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Blackstone Fell by Martin Edwards. My thanks to Sophie at Ransom PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Head of Zeus for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do hop over to Instagram and check out the post by my tour buddy for today, Jan at Jan_is_reading.

Blackstone FellAbout the Book

Yorkshire, 1606. A man vanishes from a locked gatehouse in a remote village. 300 years later, it happens again.

Autumn 1930. Journalist Nell Fagan knows there’s only one person who can get to the bottom of this mystery: Rachael Savernake. But someone wants Nell dead, and soon, while investigating a series of recent deaths at Blackstone Sanatorium, she’s missing entirely.

Looking for answers, Rachel travels to lonely Blackstone Fell, with its eerie moor, deadly waters and sinister tower. With help from Jacob Flint – who’s determined to expose a fraudulent medium at a séance – Rachel will risk her life to bring an end to the disappearances…

Format: Hardback (416 pages)             Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 1st September 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

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My Review

Blackstone Fell is the third book in Martin Edwards’s Rachel Savernake series. I haven’t read either of the earlier books in the series – Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall – but I don’t think it is essential to have done so in order to enjoy Blackstone Fell. If anything waiting for the first appearance in person of Rachel Savernake, having had snippets of information about her from other characters, only increased my curiosity. And wasn’t it worth the wait because she makes a fascinating central character, a sort of female Sherlock Holmes (but without the pipe).

Rachel is a rich young woman whose early life is shrouded in mystery (although it will be more familiar to readers of the earlier books). As Rachel admits, she loves the thrill of the unexpected. ‘Puzzles, mysteries – the more outlandish, the better.’ She guards her privacy with ‘a ruthless zeal’ and is a formidable adversary.  The members of Rachel’s household – Martha Trueman, Martha’s brother Clifford and Clifford’s wife Hetty – are devoted to her; not so much servants as a ‘tight-knit cabal’. Rachel is good at utilising their talents as part of her investigations whether that’s gathering gossip or conducting a little subterfuge.

I confess it took me a while to familiarise myself with the different inhabitants of Blackstone Fell and understand the layout of the village. (The book contains a map but this wasn’t included in my advance digital copy.) Safe to say there are the usual features of small village life: gossip, petty rivalries and tall stories exchanged at the bar of the public house.

The book has a number of different strands including those inexplicable disappearances from Blackstone Lodge, efforts to expose a medium who is preying upon the loved ones of the deceased and a series of deaths from natural causes (or were they?) at a local sanatorium.  Throw in some religous zealotry, infidelity, poison pen letters, financial skulduggery, greed and thwarted ambition, and you have a heady mix all set against the backdrop of a remote location.  ‘The brooding moors, the deadly marsh, Blackstone Leap.’

Blackstone Fell contains many of the elements of classic crime fiction including a denoument at which, with all the suspects gathered together, Rachel reveals the solutions to what turn out to be more than one mystery.  A neat touch is the addition of a ‘cluefinder’ at the end of the book (apparently all the fashion during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction) in which the author identifies the pages on which clues appeared. Well done if you spotted any of these because most of them passed me by, but then I don’t have the observational skills, breadth of knowledge or deductive ability of Rachel Savernake.

Blackstone Fell will appeal to fans of classic crime fiction (think Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers),  those who like to be immersed in the milieu of an earlier age and who enjoy the challenge of unravelling an intricate plot.

In three words: Intricate, clever, intriguing

Try something similar: Dark Dawn Over Steep House by M.R.C. Kasasian

Martin EdwardsAbout the Author

Martin Edwards has won the Edgar, Agatha, H.R.F. Keating, Macavity, Poirot and Dagger awards as well as being shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize.  He is President of the Detection Club, a former Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and consultant to the British Library’s bestselling crime classics series. In 2020 he was awarded the Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to crime fiction.

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#BlogTour #BookReview The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne

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The House at Helygen Blog Tour PosterWelcome to the final day of the blog tour for The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne. My thanks to Katya at Quercus for inviting me to take part and for my review copy. You can read my thoughts on the book, which was published on 18th August, below.

The House at HelygenAbout the Book

2019. When Henry Fox is found dead in his ancestral home in Cornwall, the police rule it a suicide, but his pregnant wife, Josie, believes it was murder. Desperate to make sense of Henry’s death she embarks on a quest to learn the truth, all under the watchful eyes of Henry’s overbearing mother. Josie soon finds herself wrestling against the dark history of Helygen House and ghosts from the past that refuse to stay buried.

1881. New bride Eliza arrives at Helygen House with high hopes for her marriage. Yet when she meets her new mother-in-law, an icy and forbidding woman, her dreams of a new life are dashed. And when Eliza starts to hear voices in the walls of the house, she begins to fear for her sanity and her life.

Can Josie piece together the past to make sense of her present, or will the secrets of Helygen House and its inhabitants forever remain a mystery?

Format: Paperback (368 pages)        Publisher: Quercus
Publication date: 18th August 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Dual Time

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My Review

Moving between past and present, The House at Helygen starts off mysterious, progresses to sinister and concludes as full-on melodrama.  If you’re looking for a book with the vibes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, you’re in the right place. The present day Helygen House even has a west wing previously destroyed by fire. And if you were looking for a modern day equivalent of Rebecca‘s Mrs Danvers then look no further than Josie’s mother-in-law, Alice, who in her habits and attitudes seems a woman ‘from another time entirely… who doesn’t live in the modern world at all’, closely followed by Eliza’s mother-in-law, Harriet, in the 19th century story.

Told from the point of view of two women, separated by over a century but who share many of the same experiences, plus the voice of a third woman through means of a journal, that narrative device beloved of historical novelists, The House at Helygen contains everything you might want from a historical suspense novel.

The author creates a brooding sense of menace which gradually builds as the house reveals it secrets and the dark past of the families who have occupied it. A silhouette glimpsed in a doorway, an unexplained cry in the night, a shadowy figure under a willow tree (very The Turn of the Screw), something scratching against a window ‘like fingers clawing to get in’.  And then there’s the disquieting atmosphere of some of the unused rooms of Helygen House where past and present seem separated by a mere whisper. Josie’s friend, Flick, sums it up well. ‘It just feels weird in here. Like something isn’t quite right. Like the air has been disturbed, and we’re trespassing. Like we shouldn’t be in here at all.’

The House at Helygen is a skilfully crafted story of obsession, secrets and what might be a grim inheritance.

In three words: Atmospheric, suspenseful, intricate

Try something similar: A Woman Made of Snow by Elisabeth Gifford

Victoria HawthorneAbout the Author

Vikki Patis is the bestselling author of psychological thrillers In the Dark (2021), The Wake (2020), Girl, Lost (2020), The Girl Across the Street (2019), and The Diary (2018). Girl, Lost, a top 100 bestseller on Amazon, was later longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2020. Her latest thriller, Return to Blackwater House, was published in March 2022 by Hodder & Stoughton.

She is represented by Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency and also writes historical fiction as Victoria Hawthorne. Her first historical suspense novel, The House at Helygen, was published in April 2022 by Quercus, with another to follow in 2023.

Vikki has also written articles for numerous publications. After being diagnosed with Perthes disease as a child, fibromyalgia in 2016 and coeliac disease in 2018, she tries to raise awareness of living with a chronic illness through her writing, and includes a diverse range of characters in her fiction. She lives in Scotland with her wife, two wild golden retrievers, and an even wilder cat.

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