The Prisoner of Raven’s Gaze Hall
The raven sits on the ravenstone,
And his black wing flits
O’er the milk-white bones…Manfred, by Lord Byron
England, 1919
Catherine Sisley is home from her nursing role in the war and mourning the death of her beloved, Captain Leo Beaufort.
She is unsure about her future, and when a former patient, John Lestrange, writes to her asking if she will come to Raven’s Gaze Hall in Yorkshire to nurse his ailing grandmother, she decides to go.
But Raven’s Gaze turns out to be a house with a dark past.
There is the enigmatic Bennet Lestrange, John’s father, whom Catherine comes to dislike and fear. And there is the secrecy surrounding the deaths of John’s mother and brother, both of whom are never mentioned.
And then Catherine finds an old nursery with abandoned toys and a room with a hospital bed where a patient had obviously been restrained.
Feeling she is being spied on, and repulsed by the tense atmosphere, Catherine is determined to leave.
But something pulls her back…
Will Catherine uncover the mysteries lurking in the Hall? Can she find happiness again after the grief of the First World War?
Or will the darkness at Raven’s Gaze Hall take her over…?
THE PRISONER OF RAVEN’S GAZE HALL is a Gothic mystery set in England after the First World War, exposing family secrets and the legacy of trauma from the war and its aftermath.
REVIEW
Fabulously atmospheric and gripping. Nurse Catherine Sisley is left without work when her employers go abroad. After a chance acquaintance with a man she remembers from her time nursing at the Front, she decides to take a nursing job at Raven’s Gaze Hall. Remote and isolated on the Lancashire moors, she thinks it might be peaceful after the terrors of war. But Raven’s Gaze Hall, as its creepy name suggests, is a place of secrets and lies. Presided over by eccentric owner Bennet Le Strange, who likes nothing more than to point out all the dreadful history of the building and its surroundings, Catherine soon feels uneasy. Her friend John, who is still suffering from shell shock, will tell her little about how his parents died, and why he is tied to this forbidding place or why Bennet LeStrange has such a hold on them all. Catherine begins to explore and finds a friend in Grizel, a kind of wise woman who provides homespun remedies to the locals such as Clemmie and her ailing husband, Ted. Grizel is a character that the reader can instantly trust, unlike all the others who seem to be hiding something.
The discovery of a locked room, complete with restraints, adds to the gloomy atmosphere. Who was held there and why?
The thing I admired most about this novel was the way the shadow of the war seemed to taint everything; the men driven mad by the trenches and the horror of watching their friends and comrades die. Today we would call it PTSD, then it was just ‘shellshock.’ The opening scenes at the Casualty Clearing Station and the horrors of Passchendaele haunt the rest of the book. The detail of the primitive conditions of the every day lives of the nurses, how the horrific wounds were treated, the carbolic and chloroform, the shrapnel and gas, are both eye-opening and tragic. Raven’s Gaze Hall is a gothic mystery with a serious amount of research underpinning it, and it shows. Not only is this a mystery to keep you up at night, but this is a book rooted in real history that really brings home the legacy of the First World War. Highly recommended.
This book is also available on KindleUnlimited.
