Quite easily, hands down, one of the best books I have read all year!

Packed cover to cover with spine tingling atmosphere and goosebump inducing tension, this book is all set to give you chills.

Writing a review for this book is proving hard as I really don’t want to give away any spoilers, and for me, giving away any spoilers is a pretty shitty thing to do as they have the potential to spoil it for new readers. It’s like watching a film with my daughter, one that she has already seen. It always ends up with me not needing to continue watching it as she can’t help herself, she tells me what is about to happen before it happens! Where is the fun in that! So I will make sure to not give any away so that you can be as stunned as I was with the turn of events as they race across the pages.

And who said fiction wasn’t educational? Thanks to this book I have some great new words added to my vocabulary! Wonderful words such as idiosyncrasies, acquiesced, sagacity, inveigling, and vociferous.

Set in 1917, Stella Marcham has returned from France where she had been working as a VAD nurse, after the death of her fiancé, Gerald, an officer that was killed on the battlefield. Back living with her father and stepmother, they are worried about her as she has taken Geralds death hard, drowning in grief, to the extent their family doctor has been suggesting that maybe Stella should be admitted into a psychiatric hospital.

Stella’s sister, Madeleine is expecting a child and her husband has sent her away to live with his mother in the countryside for her safety, away from London and the threats of bombings. However Madeline is not happy at Greyswick, a rambling country manor house, so her husband asks Stella if she would join her sister at Greyswick for company and also to reassure her that there is nothing in the house to be worried about. Madeline is convinced there is something not right with the house, she has been hearing a young child crying, and footsteps in the night that only she hears and that some of the people in the house have it in for her.

As Stella and her maid Annie Burrows arrive at Greyswick, it isn’t long for them to also notice that there is something not right, and they both can hear what Madeleine has been hearing. Not quite what Hector wanted when he asked Stella to go and stay with his wife. In a bid to prove to his distraught wife that the house isn’t haunted, he calls in the help of Mr Sheers, a man of science who has had some success in uncovering some charlatans who claimed they could converse with the dead, and using science was able to explain away all the claims the charlatans made.

However, things take a different turn when the master of the house, Hector, also encounters a presence and occurrences that couldn’t just be dismissed, so in a bid to reassure the women he sets out to find a vicar from a different borough to preform and exorcism and cleanse the house. The non believer of the house, Mr Sheers goes along with it with the hopes that it would cleanse the women’s minds of the hysteria they are both feeling. But as the exorcism gets underway, things start to happen, things that cant be explained rationally and ends with a bleeding vicar and a very traumatised wife.

Annie Burrows has always been deemed as different all her life, talking to herself, or to people no one else can see and it is Annie’s help the Stella requires. She is convinced Annie has a special gift, just as her father had before her. She can hear and sometimes see spirits. So after the failed exorcism, Stella pleads with the maid Annie to speak up and help.

Annie had drawn aside the porous veil that separates this world from the next, just as I once believed her father had on the night of the fire, enabling him to rescue Lydia.

So with Annie’s help she tells them that it is Lucien that is haunting the house. Lucien Arthur Brightwell at the tender age of 5 had a tragic accident, he fell down the stairs from the nursery and died. “It is Lucien, but I can’t make him go. He’s waited to long, he won’t stop until he gets what he wants. What he wants is justice.

Misfortune stalked the halls of Greyswick – it had stolen a child.

Mr Sheers had his theories and explanations to the phenomenonable goings on, citing telekinesis as one scientific explanation, and the lady of the house, Lady Brightwell, and her companion Miss Scott are quick to agree with all of Mr Sheers explanations. As well as the housekeeper, Mrs Henge.

There are lots of shadows in Greyswick. Mrs Henge seems to occupy most of them.

Knowing her sister will never be save or settled in the house until whatever is happening inside those walls has been sorted, Madeleine goes back home to stay with her parents whilst Stella, Annie and Mr Sheen stay behind to investigate the houses history and the secrets the house has kept silenced until now. Now the truth wants to come out and it will change their lives forever, with far reaching effects.

This house is full of terrible secrets, Mr Sheers, secrets the dead are no longer content to let lie.

It is from these investigations into Greyswik’s and its employees that truths begin to come to light with some shocking twists along the way, ones that you won’t see coming, leading to some of the best twists I have read this year. Unpredictable and astounding! Publication day for this book is set for 31 October 2019 and Halloween could not be a more perfect day for this book to come to live in the world!

It is available for preorder now so you get your copy release day – Halloween ( )

I really liked this one but big ooof on iffy portrayals of stigmatized groups of people

(vaguely said to avoid spoilers) ( )

Spooky season isn't too far away so I feel I wanted to start reading books that are a bit more scary.

The Lost Ones follows Stella who is grieving for her dead fiance. It's 1917 and the first world war is still happening, but Stella has returned home from France. Her sister Madeleine is pregnant and Stella is invited to keep her company at Greyswick. It isn't long before things go bump in the night and starts to get spooky.

There was a lot I enjoyed about this book. I loved the setting of Greyswick, give me a story with a haunted house anyday. The ghostly happenings for me were typical haunted house, strange noises and sounds that are connected to a story that is uncovered connected to the house. I didn't find the story scary but it does take a lot for me to get spooked from a book, whereas a scary film has me jumping out my seat. However the story has got a creepy feel to it and I found very atmospheric at times.

I enjoyed the story but did guess some of the reveals especially as the book progressed. This book was quite a satisfactory ghost story. I did think I dragged a little in the middle but glad I carried onto the end.

Thank you to the publisher via Netgalley for the book although I'm a little behind getting to reading the book. ( )

Stella Marcham is in mourning for her fiancé who died at the Battle of the Somme. When her brother-in-law asks her to stay with her pregnant sister at Greyswick, the Brightwell family home, she readily agrees. But Madeleine is distracted and worried; she hears a child's sobbing at night and someone keeps leaving toy soldiers in her bed. Initially Stella is certain that the events have a rational explanation. Soon, however, she experiences the same inexplicable things as Madeleine, but both women are labelled hysterical by the remaining inhabitants: Lady Brightwell, her companion Miss Scott and the housekeeper Mrs Henge. Are the two women both victims of frail nervous states or is there a supernatural power at work at Greyswick?

With so many men away fighting in France, the country is emptied of men and it is the women who are left, apart from those men who are too old (or young) to serve, who are – rightly or wrongly – in protected professions or positions, or who have done their duty but are no longer fit to wear the uniform. Anita Frank conveys this atmosphere very well, first in the larger community, then magnified at Greyswick – the novel's focus is firmly on the women, though there are some brief descriptions of the horror of war, sensitively handled and illuminating the terrible waste of human lives.

Even though the reader is aware that there is a supernatural angle to the story from the beginning (the cover art and the blurb make this clear), it takes time to evolve, with both women initially labelled unreliable witnesses, mainly for the fault of being female and thus prone to irrationality and hysteria. It takes until the attempted exorcism on p. 200+ for the ghostly goings-on to become more pronounced, and the few shocking moments are well handled. On the whole, though, the supernatural events are rather tame and it was the interplay between the characters that kept my interest.

This is the author's debut novel and I thought it showed: the plot relies too much on Stella being in the right place at the right time to listen in on confidential conversations, and what was a solid storyline sadly turns into cliché, melodrama and finally outright farce at the end. ( )

This was one of my Christmas gifts, so I'm glad I enjoyed the story! In 1917, Stella Marcham is still in mourning for her lost fiance when she is dispatched to the stately pile of her new in laws, the Brightwells, to provide comfort and companionship for her pregnant sister. Madeleine has turned into a nervous wreck since leaving London and going to stay at Greyswick, and her husband is concerned. But is Stella's sister imagining the ghostly goings on in the old nursery, or is she simply overwrought? Stella and 'gifted' maid Annie are sent to calm Madeleine's nerves, but soon find themselves sinking deeper into the long buried secrets of the house and the women who live there.

There was an element of deja vu about the wartime setting, slightly cliched characters and Agatha Christie-esque detective work, and I was ahead of the plot twists for most of the time, but I still absolutely loved this story! Stella falls into the usual 'lady detective' role - well-to-do, recently bereft, stubborn and outspoken - but I enjoyed her narration and wanted her to succeed in her self-imposed quest to discover the truth at Greyswick. She and Madeleine seem to be styled on the sisters in The Woman in White, which Stella was gifted by her late fiance, so Madeleine is fairly fey throughout, merely a catalyst to throw her sister into the action. Tristan Steers, the amputee soldier drafted in by Madeleine's husband to throw scepticism on his wife's supernatural fears, is wonderfully enigmatic, however, and the women at Greyswick are a coven of suspects (I had the right crime and motive, but the wrong culprit!) Housekeeper Mrs Henge knocks Mrs Danvers' creepy devotion into a cocked hat!

The story is well paced and kept me hooked, but the ending, I'm afraid, went into overkill - no pun intended - and almost ruined the whole book for me. Stella's habit of happening across private conversations between the same two people also happened once too often to work as a credible method of gleaning information. The ghostly atmosphere of the house, especially during the attempted 'exorcism' (do local vicars really offer that service?), was the best part of the story, however, and I'm not usually a fan of the 'haunted house' genre! Good for you, young Lucien!

A fast, captivating read, even in hardback - recommended! ( )