Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Although hyped as a cosy the secret at the core of this novel is obscene, and presented as a kind of ghost to haunt a party held in a Scottish hotel in the nineteen twenties. This was a period when society was in a state of flux after the horrors of the First World War. Many people were grieving, desperate to be in contact with their loved ones again. And there were others, exploiting that grief.
The eponymous fates are mediums who travel the country holding
seances: some solace perhaps to their dupes and it pays the rent but in the course of their profession one particular trio has acquired a sort of esoteric knowledge that pre-dates and transcends even war. At this gathering in the Border country they hold a séance ostensibly to summon the dead – and murder intervenes.
One of the party guests, summoned mysteriously and anonymously, is Armstrong’s “lady investigator”, Ruby Vaughn, making her second appearance; her first was in the previous novel, The Curse of Penryth Hall, plugged hard in this one. In her twenties this new protagonist has had a full life: orphanage, child-bride, heiress, jail; currently she owns a bookshop in Exeter where she has installed as manager the enigmatic and elderly Mr Owen whose own past is redolent with violent death.
You may miss how Ruby became a detective but she is here, full-fledged: curious, indomitable, fleet of foot - desirable, to judge by the number of men anxious to jump into her knickers (sic. This cosy is shocking on more than one count). Fortunately she has one stalwart lover: Ruan, a pellar from Cornwall, a healer and rather prim white witch. Together they make a wild team to pit against strange killers in an atmosphere and ambiance where, in the words of one character, “none of us are who we pretend to be. Some simply do not know what they are.”
Armstrong manipulates facts and fantasy, reality and the occult to obscure a simple plot. There is a secret: a monstrous crime; there is the threat of exposure, blackmail, murder, and some inadequate investigating which results in both Ruby and the inept Mr Owen emerging the prime suspects: framed of course, and herself even shot by a stray hunter’s bullet.
Violence and comedy are inextricable; wounded, Ruby falls in a lake, is saved from drowning and hypothermia to be warmed up in Ruan’s bed: nothing graphic but innuendoes proliferate as the body count rises. There are shocks round every corner, and never a coincidence that can’t be explained by magic.
This novel falls into the category of “cosy” only by virtue of its breathless loquacity. Modify that and we may have something really sinister: not original but promising, neither cosy nor noir but suggestive: the canker in the heart of the rose.
