Towards the end of Kate Mosse's deliciously hokey new spinetingler, a young woman descends the damp, musty steps into a disused ice house clutching a flickering lantern and groping through her amnesiac mind for the collective nouns of birds: a parliament, clamour or storytelling of rooks, a tiding of magpies, a colony of jackdaws and what was it for crows again? Of course! A murder!
Anybody seeking a good, gothic spooker to snuggle into need look no further. Although Mosse is best known for her sprawling Languedoc trilogy (beginning with Labyrinth in 2005), I much prefer her crisper stand-alone tales, and The Taxidermist's Daughter is her best yet.
It's set "on the edge of the drowned marshes" of a small Sussex village and although the year is 1912, this is the kind of place where "the old superstitions still hold sway".
It opens at midnight as the whispering villagers gather outside the flint-walled church on the Eve of St Mark, when it is believed the ghosts of those destined to die in the coming year will materialise at the tolling of the bell.
Our heroine, 22-year-old Connie Gifford, is lurking in the shadows, trying to keep an eye on her alcoholic father with whom she lives a solitary life in a house "filled with fur and feathers, bell jars and black beaded eyes, wire and cotton and tow": all that is left of their once famous museum of taxidermy.
