Published by
Head of Zeus,
14 August 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-83793262-7 (HB)
This
is a book that you will love or you will loathe: you feel as you finish it that
you have just escaped from a maze lined with angled mirrors lit by a single
flickering torch.
For a variety of reasons, a group of ill-matched
visitors, allegedly innocent spirit-seekers, descend by unreliable transport on
a haunted house almost immediately cut off by floods. It’s not just any old
house: once a family mansion, it was transformed in the First World War into a
military hospital, not all of whose patients survived.
And not all of the guests will survive either,
though whether this will be at the hands of a mischievous ghost or those of
living guests remains to be seen.
Mead’s wonderful series protagonist, an illusionist
turned amateur sleuth, has naturally turned up to uncover the truth, though his
old police ally, Inspector Flint, is not with him. He’s busy investigating what
looks like a murder in London – though with Mead, what looks like something rarely
is.
This is a novel to engage not your emotions but what
another amateur sleuth called one’s ‘little grey cells’: It is a masterpiece of
plotting, of wilful misleading, of period detail and even period language,
coruscating in polysyllabic vocabulary tormented into complex sentences (see,
it’s catching!). Yes, it’s a Golden Age
pastiche – but what a breath taking piece of writing it is.
Amazing – and strongly recommended.
------
Reviewer: Judith Cutler
Tom Mead is a UK-based
author specializing in crime fiction. His stories have appeared in Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Litro
Online, Flash: The International Short-Short Story
Magazine, Lighthouse, Mystery Scene and Mystery
Weekly (among others). Several of his pieces have also been anthologized,
most recently “Heatwave” in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year
2021 (ed. Lee Child). He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and
the International Thriller Writers’ Organization. https://tommeadauthor.com
Judith
Cutler started
writing while she was at the then Oldbury Grammar School, winning the Critical
Quarterly Short Story prize with the second story she wrote. She subsequently
read English at university. It was an attack of chickenpox caught from her son
that kick-started her writing career. One way of dealing with the itch was to
hold a pencil in one hand, a block of paper in the other - and so she wrote her
first novel. This eventually appeared in a much-revised version as Coming
Alive, published by Severn House. Judith has eight series. The first two
featured amateur sleuth Sophie Rivers (10 books) and Detective Sergeant Kate
Power (6 Books). Then came two, books featuring Josie Welford, a middle-aged
woman with a quick tongue, and a love of good food. The Lina Townsend books are set in the world of antiques and
there are seven books in this series. There are three books featuring Tobias
Campion set in the Regency period, and her series featuring Chief
Superintendent Fran Harman (6 books). Her more recently a series feature a head
teacher Jane Cowan (3 books). Judith has also written three standalone’s Staging
Death, Scar Tissue, and Death In Elysium. Her recent series is set in Victorian
times featuring Harriett & Matthew Rowsley. In At the Death is the sixth
book in this series, published in January 2025.
http://www.judithcutler.com
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