The Golden Key
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Spiritualism, the suffragette movement, and the fairy tales of Lewis Carroll” combine in this eerie Gothic mystery that will “captivate fans of historical fiction” (Booklist).
Helena Walton-Cisneros is called to solve a decades-old cold case in the Fens of Norfolk—an age-old ‘fairyland’ of folklore, dark magic, and missing children . . .
1901. After the death of Queen Victoria, England heaves with the uncanny. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.
Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for her ability to find the lost and the displaced, is hired by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens.
But the Fens are an age-old land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. The locals speak of devilmen and catatonic children are found on the Broads. Here, Helena finds what she was sent for, as the Fenland always gives up its secrets, in the end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Womack s ethereal debut novel (following 2018's short story collection Lost Objects) is precise and eerie, but emotionally flat. In the late-Victorian era, Samuel Moncrieff, a melancholy university student escaping a tragedy, the details of which remain murky, joins his godfather in London and falls in with a demimonde of actors and occultists. Meanwhile, Eliza Waltraud mourns her breakup with her "life companion," Mina, by retreating to a family property haunted by her mother in the strange stretch of English countryside called the Fens. Connecting Eliza and Samuel is respected medium and master of disguise Helena Walton-Cisneros, whose investigation into a 20-year-old disappearance in the Fens puts her on the trail of both Mina and Samuel. Plot and character alike are subordinated to dazzling atmospherics and a pervasive humorless gloom. With a slow, dreamlike pace, this could hardly be considered a page-turner, and readers looking for a more traditional supernatural detective story will be dissatisfied. Patient readers willing to wade through Womack's murky, off-kilter world will be rewarded with moments of disquieting beauty.
