I suspect some readers might be too cool for this lovely book, partly because, despite its gothic horror set-up, it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits; and partly because historical novels are sometimes derided as escapist, as if they’re only a fallback for authors who can’t keep up with, say, immigration or the internet.
It takes place over a single year in the 1890s, in an Essex village where — if the rumours are to be believed — a monstrous sea creature skulks in the estuary, blamed for horrors from disembowelled livestock to a man’s corpse washing up on the marsh, his neck snapped.
Up from London amid this panic is Cora, a wealthy amateur naturalist, liberated by the death of her abusive husband. When friends introduce her to the local vicar, Ransome, their jousts over God and geology turn to will-they-won’t-they ardour, observed by his wife (whose dodgy-sounding cough escapes attention) and Garrett, a maverick surgeon who took a shine to Cora while treating her dying husband.
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