‘The Prisoner of Raven’s Gaze Hall’ by J. C. Briggs

Published by Sapere Books,
9 December 2025.  
ISBN: 979-0-831160997-5 (PB)

This is the fourth novel in Briggs’s Gothic Mystery series, all of which feature a remote country house in the northwest of England and the effects of the Great War on its inhabitants and the people who live near it. This novel begins with a prologue set in 1932. Catherine Sisley is looking back to events which occurred immediately after the war, and the reader is tantalized with what mysteries there were at Raven’s Gaze Hall. During the war Catherine nursed at the front where one of her patients was John Lestrange, heir to Raven’s Gaze. When she returns home to Dorset (where she has been brought up by an aunt) after the war, Catherine is mourning the death of her love, Captain Leo Beaufort, and is trying to work out her future. Lestrange writes to her asking if she will come to Raven’s Gaze to nurse his infirm grandmother. Encouraged by her aunt, but with some reluctance, she takes up the offer on an initial three-month trial basis. 

When Catherine arrives at Raven’s Gaze, she finds its remoteness and inhabitants unsettling. Bennet Lestrange, John’s father, is a dislikeable character who spends most of his time researching and writing books about local history. Mrs Whitenow, Catherine’s patient, is not an easy woman. Mrs Slee, the housekeeper, is unpleasant and deals out ‘rough insolence’. Her niece, Betty, who helps around the hall, is no better. John, cowed by his father, is frequently away on unexplained business leaving Catherine feeling very isolated. There is mystery concerning the deaths of John’s mother and brother some time previously, any mention of whom is avoided as far as possible. Catherine discovers an abandoned nursery and a room with a bed in which a patient had clearly been restrained. As Bennet Lestrange observes at one point, ‘We all have our secrets’. Catherine’s only friends are two local women, Annot Syke and Grizel Knipe. 

Catherine feels she is under permanent scrutiny at Raven’s Gaze, and this, combined with her revulsion at the tense atmosphere (nobody seems to like anyone else), makes her determined to leave. Unfortunately, events conspire to keep Catherine at the house. Her personal circumstances alter in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. There are deaths, and a will makes Catherine’s position even more difficult. By this point her two friends have moved away, She is on her own. 

The last section of the novel returns, as it were, to 1932 and events consequent to the prologue. By this time both Annot Syke and Grizel Knipe have returned to Raven’s Gaze and ask Catherine to visit them. They are able to tell some of the secrets that were kept from her, and between them the three women manage to unravel one particular mystery which has hovered, almost unspoken, throughout the story. The discover other things as well. It is a very satisfying conclusion. As in the previous novels, Briggs writes with considerable sympathy, intelligence and a keenly researched sense of the period (as ever she provides some interesting notes at the end). She is particularly good at yearning, loss and oppression – and mystery, of course. Strong, confident and decent women ultimately prevail, but Briggs is far too even-handed a writer to make it a feminist polemic. The bleakness of much of the story is leavened by the decency at the end of it. It is an excellent novel which I am happy to recommend wholeheartedly.
-------
Reviewer: David Whittle 

Jean Briggs taught English for many years in schools in Cheshire, Hong Kong, and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage by a river in Cumbria with a view of the Howgill Fells and a lot of sheep, though it is the streets of Victorian London that are mostly in her mind when she is writing about Charles Dickens as a detective. There are eleven novels in the series so far, published by Sapere Books. The latest, The Jaggard Case, came out in October 2022. Number eleven, The Waxwork Man, comes out on September 15^th. Another novel will come out at the end of 2023. This is a new departure, a novel about an empty house called Foulstone in the old county of Westmorland, a house with secrets kept since the First World War. She was Vice Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association (2018-2022), is still a board member of the CWA, a member of Historical Writers’ Association, the Dickens Fellowship, The Society of Authors, and a trustee of Sedbergh Book Town. 

jcbriggsbooks.com  

David Whittle is firstly a musician (he is an organist and was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School for over 30 years) but has always enjoyed crime fiction. This led him to write a biography of the composer Bruce Montgomery who is better known to lovers of crime fiction as Edmund Crispin, about whom he gives talks now and then.