If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
See also
These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
Review
I enjoyed Louise Mumford’s second novel, The Safe House, but this really felt like an author who’s honed her craft to perfection. This is a well-plotted, spooky thriller with serious menace and some great characterisation. The main character, Bex, is traumatised after the disappearance of her best friend during a youthful adventure to a “haunted” abandoned hotel, Ravencliffe. Their recordings of the incident having been turned into a commercialised film, the three teenagers who returned from Ravencliffe took their own paths, none of them especially happy. The premise for the start of the novel is a return to Ravencliffe ten years on to make a new documentary. While Richard and Oscar seem to be motivated by the money and the attention, Bex wants to find the truth.
Bex really shines here, and Mumford has put in a great deal of careful thinking about how the traumatic experience might have affected her protagonist, who as well as isolating herself suffers from depression and some symptoms of OCD. These really resonate, in particular her attachment to the number four, whose obvious significance (the number of friends who went into Ravencliffe) is underpinned by further echoes and meaning as the novel goes on.
Mumford makes her somewhat outré set-up ring true with just the right amount of background detail. She tells the story by weaving between the two visits to Ravencliffe, ten years apart, and I found the time jumps effective. Although, of course, we expect the supernatural elements of the “haunted” house to fall away as the mystery unravels (as so often the case with supernatural detective fiction!), Mumford makes the menace particularly eerie, and even our sceptical reading minds feel a little twinge of doubt at the height of the drama! This is really helped by the Victorian subplot, the source of the hotel’s “haunted” label, as generically the supernatural is often a cover for the persecution and mistreatment of women, such as in The Woman in White.
If there is a weakness, I think it is in the rapidity of the bonding of Bex and Sophie at the end of the novel. The epilogue of any mystery thriller can always be a let down, but for a novel that rang true everywhere else, this felt slightly too neat and tidy for two women who had not seen one another since one was a young child.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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