This is fun.  A séance, aristocratic guests, ghosts, murder and secrets, all on an island cut off by a storm. In 1917. With winter approaching us in the twenty first century, what more could we possibly want? Curl up on the sofa with something warm, and enjoy.

On one level this is a ‘cosy’ read because it has the characteristics of this genre. The claustrophobia of a house cut off by nature and populated with an assortment of guests who each has his or her own secrets and agenda is comfortingly familiar. Murder is to be expected. The background, however, is 1917 and the First World War is entering its most brutal phase.  The characters of Donovan, for whom memories of the Somme are far too vivid, and Kate Cartwright, who lost her brother there, ensure that the reader is never quite allowed to forget the very real horrors just across the Channel from Blackwater Abbey and its oddly assorted guests. The plot ties the two worlds together in a way that is sometimes uncomfortable.

Just as A House of Ghosts  is not quite a ‘cosy’, nor is it a ghost story in a conventional way. But you can’t ignore the ghosts. Nor can the house guests.  The links between the living and the dead may make you shiver occasionally on your comfortable sofa  and wonder where that draught came from.

You are in safe hands with this book. The author is clearly a natural story teller and draws you in to the twists and turns of a plot which is almost as complicated as the Abbey’s architecture.  All does become clear – but you may be surprised. I finished this book feeling that I’d had a good read with a story which wasn’t quite what I’d expected. And that I wouldn’t mind meeting its central characters again.

Review by Penny Deacon, author of A Kind of Puritan  and  A Thankless Child

A House of Ghosts by W.C. Ryan published in hardback 4th Oct, Zaffre, £12.99