Zaffre – MJ Porter

Here’s the blurb

When an anonymous letter is delivered to the Clarendon English Dictionary, it is rapidly clear that this is not the usual lexicographical enquiry. Instead, the letter hints at secrets and lies linked to a particular year.

For Martha Thornhill, the new senior editor, the date can mean only one thing: the summer her brilliant older sister Charlie went missing. After a decade abroad, Martha has returned home to the city whose ancient institutions have long defined her family. Have the ghosts she left behind her been waiting for her return?

When more letters arrive, and Martha and her team pull apart the complex clues within them, the mystery becomes ever more insistent and troubling. It seems Charlie had been keeping a powerful secret, and someone is trying to lead the lexicographers towards the truth. But other forces are no less desperate to keep it well and truly buried.

Cover image for Susie Dent's Guilty by Definition.

My Review

Guilty by Definition rises above other celebrity mysteries by being excellent.

This story is well-plotted and well-devised, delightfully intermingled with snippets about the Clarendon Dictionary and the little foibles of the English language, and has a great storyline. It also offers a lovely conjuring of Oxford and the surrounding location—as well as some special Oxford-specific events.

Our four main characters are well-developed, and all have their secrets as they endeavour to solve the perplexing riddles and, in doing so, answer the questions surrounding Martha’s sister’s disappearance.

It is a complex mystery that is sure to appeal to fans of the genre and the English language. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I loved it:)

The drive leads past the gate house and through the trees towards the big house, visible through the winter-bared branches. Its windows stare down at Harkin and the sea beyond . . .

January 1921. Though the Great War is over, in Ireland a new, civil war is raging. The once-grand Kilcolgan House, a crumbling bastion shrouded in sea-mist, lies half empty and filled with ghosts – both real and imagined – the Prendevilles, the noble family within, co-existing only as the balance of their secrets is kept.

Then, when an IRA ambush goes terribly wrong, Maud Prendeville, eldest daughter of Lord Kilcolgan, is killed, leaving the family reeling. Yet the IRA column insist they left her alive, that someone else must have been responsible for her terrible fate. Captain Tom Harkin, an IRA intelligence officer and Maud’s former fiancé, is sent to investigate, becoming an unwelcome guest in this strange, gloomy household.

Working undercover, Harkin must delve into the house’s secrets – and discover where, in this fractured, embattled town, each family member’s allegiances truly lie. But Harkin too is haunted by the ghosts of the past and by his terrible experiences on the battlefields. Can he find out the truth about Maud’s death before the past – and his strange, unnerving surroundings – overwhelm him?

A haunting, atmospheric mystery set against the raw Irish landscape in a country divided, The Winter Guest is the perfect chilling read.

The Winter Guest is my first W C Ryan book, but it won’t be my last.

The Winter Guest is a little awkward to get into. The first chapter could perhaps be better placed elsewhere or left out altogether, but once past that point, and as the reader meets Harkin, we’re quickly drawn into his world. A man suffering from PTSD following the Great War and involving himself in the IRA, is a man on the edge, inhabiting a world filled with suspicion and shadows, where things that seem real, are simply not.

He is a sympathetic character and the reader feels. a great deal of empathy for him.

The landscape he walks into is one bedevilled by atmospheric weather conditions – there is a great deal of attention spent on creating the image of a house on the cusp of ruin, a family in the midst of ruin and the weather conditions prevalent at the coastline. On occasion, it feels a little too much but the lack of electricity, the reliance on candles, ensures that the slightly other-worldly elements can never be forgotten. The flashback descriptions of life in the trenches of the Great War haunt the reader as well as Harkin,

You may have noticed that I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I would put it on a par with last year’s The Glass Woman and The Quickening. A haunting story not to be missed. My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my review copy