h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kate Mosse is most famous for her trilogy of historical/fantasy/ghost novels set in and around Carcassonne in southern France. These include Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel. The first of these, Labyrinth, was immensely popular in the UK, selling about 850,000 copies in 2006, sales only exceeded by 'The Da Vinci Code'. Mosse has written a few books since then, but few with the popularity of this 'Languedoc Trilogy'.

Her latest offering, 'The Taxidermist's Daughter', is a gothic horror story, set in southern England just before the Great War. Society was very different at that time with a clear division between 'gentlemen' and working-class people. Without telephones, people communicate by sending each other letters and notes. Transport is by hansom cab for the rich or by railway or on foot for the poor. And there is an undercurrent of hidden crimes of child abuse and mistreatment of women which is probably no different from today but is ignored and uninvestigated by the authorities.

The story takes place in and around the village of Fishbourne near the city of Chichester, on the marshes of the south coast. Connie, the eponymous taxidermist's daughter, lives with her father in a house on the marshes. Her father ekes out a meagre existence with a few commissions, mounting stuffed birds for display cases, but the golden age of taxidermy has passed. He is degenerating into alcoholism. Connie herself was involved in an accident when she was 12 and lost all memory of anything before that time. Now at 22, she begins to suspect that something terrible happened 10 years before and that her father was involved in it. Then the dead body of a woman is found floating in a ditch near her house, and a number of respected gentleman from the surrounding area appear to be interested.

We discover that another woman died many years before in gruesome circumstances, murdered by the gentlemen, but someone is now actively pursuing those gentlemen and killing them off in an equally gruesome manner one by one. Who is doing the killings? Why is the corpse of the woman from the ditch taken away but the police are not informed? And can Connie recover her memories of the time before her accident?

The story enfolds over a few days - the weather is stormy and the lands around the marsh are getting more and more flooded. Alongside this, there are strange flocks of birds - carrion crows, jackdaws and magpies. Perhaps these are attracted by the dead body, but they add to the gothic feel of the story.

The story is a good read, but somewhat obvious. The minor twists in the plot were visible so far in advance that they were no great surprise. The major plot twist which I was confident would happen at the end of the book failed to materialise, leaving a somewhat disappointing ending.

Worth a read? Yes.

There's a well-preserved Roman villa at Fishbourne - does that feature in the plot?

No it doesn't, which is surprising given Mosse's love of archaeology and morphic resonances over the centuries. But the the villa was only discovered in 1960.

Yes, it is surprising. I think if I was writing a gothic horror story, I'd have used it.