The Winter Ghosts

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse

The blurb: The Great War took much more than lives. It robbed a generation of friends, lovers and futures. In Freddie Watson’s case, it took his beloved brother and, at times, his peace of mind. Unable to cope with his grief, Freddie has spent much of the time since in a sanatorium. In the winter of 1928, still seeking resolution, Freddie is travelling through the French Pyrenees – another region that has seen too much bloodshed over the years.

During a snowstorm, his car spins off the mountain road. Shaken, he stumbles into the woods, emerging by a tiny village. There he meets Fabrissa, a beautiful local woman, also mourning a lost generation. Over the course of one night, Fabrissa and Freddie share their stories of remembrance and loss. By the time dawn breaks, he will have stumbled across a tragic mystery that goes back through the centuries. By turns thrilling, poignant and haunting, this is a story of two lives touched by war and transformed by courage.

My review: I have wanted to read this book ever since I spied it at a Wh Smith’s travel in hardback, the cover is beautiful and as it was December and snowing at the time it seemed fated. However having lugged enough hardbacks around in my life I decided to wait for the paperback and it just so happened our book club chose it to read.

The Winter Ghosts is the first Kate Mosse book I have ever read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. What I felt was lacking in Susan Hill’s The Small Hand, was triple fold here, and that is old fashioned terror. Not the gory, ripping your innards out kind, but the more subtle, inferred terror, the kind that makes the hairs on your neck stand on end on a crowded tube on a Monday morning. Carefully crafted tension.

Freddie is the narrator of this wonderfully chilling ghost story, explaining to a French antiques dealer how he has come across a 600 year old letter. His emotional complexities are deeply moving and the tale, for this is definitely a tale, of the villagers of Nulle is handled beautifully. Never giving away too much about the horrors in the mountains until the last possible moment. A lovely book, well worth a read, but preferably somewhere warm and jolly!

8 out of 10 stars! ********

Live to Tell

Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner

The blurb: A savage crime has rocked a working class neighbourhood of Boston; four members of a family have been brutally murdered. The father is lying in an intensive care unit, his survival in doubt. He is the principal suspect. Female police detective DD Warren, however, is not one to take things at face value. At the same time, Danielle Burton is about to have her life thrown into turmoil; a nurse whose life is at the service of her profession, she has tentatively recovered from a devastating family tragedy of decades before – and the investigation by Warren and her partner is about the throw Danielle’s life into chaos once again. There is one more angle to the triangle: the devotion of a mother, Victoria Oliver, to her disturbed son is about to be tested to the limit.

Danielle often thinks about that night when her childhood her ended. The sound of her father shooting her mother and then hunting down her brother, as she cowered under her duvet, trying to drown out the sound. She can remember the sound her brother made as he was killed. And she can remember her father standing in the doorway of her bedroom, saying ‘I’m sorry, Danielle…’ before he turned the gun on himself. Haunting enough for any child, but Danielle has always wondered, why not her too? Why did her father let her go? Years later, Danielle is working in a hospital that deals with the most violent and damaged of children. And someone there knows something about her past, and is prepared to kill to keep it quiet…

My review: Well, there are some quite shocking twists in this book, its not for the faint hearted and it certainly kept me awake at night!

I like to think I’ve read quite a few crime books and there were one or two things I spotted from early on but Lisa Gardner writes in a way that doesnt make you feel you’ve lost out through guessing. This book reads like a movie script. It’s not overly descriptive and the characters, especially the police/detective elements are left worryingly two dimensional. The main detective, DD Warren, seems to only care about food and sex and she grated on my nerves immensley. However by about half way through she’d won me round. Namely because some of the other characters were even more annoying! I’ve since learned that DD Warren is one of Gardner’s regular characters so lets hope the stories are similarily gripping (to get away from the blonde, sexually frustrated detective angle!)

I wasn’t prepared to like this book but I did and I raced through it. This thriller gets under your skin and digs its nails in, the psychological elements are where Gardner shines. The body count is ridiculously high, easily gaining double figures before you’re halfway through the book, but unlike a lot of crime books lately its not filled with gratuitous gore. It does give you plenty to think about though and you wont look at families the same way again! A pleasing thriller.

7 out of 10 stars! *******