Really torn about this one. It was dark and gripping and twisty--Rayne is amazing at misdirection. But after a while the shocking revelations started to pile up and feel like tricksiness for the sake of tricksiness, and I'm not sure all the tricks hold up on closer examination (one definitely does not). Still, it's a good ride, and I eagerly ate it up.

See my complete review at Shelf Love. ( )

I have absolutely no idea why I expected this to be a ghost story,well, it wasn't. Nevertheless, it was still a good book. I was a bit overwhelmed by the size of it at the beginning but it was well-paced and didn't feel as long. While I'm certain, I won't read it again, I can't say I felt like wasting my time, the story was captivating with a lot of twists and stays that way until the end. ( )

As with her other novels Sarah Rayne has spotlighted a particular building to be the centre of her story. In some of her other tales we have had an old theatre,a mill house and the obligatory asylum for the insane. In this one it is a disused film studio which takes centre stage.
Lucy Trent is a researcher for Quondam Films,who are doing a presentation of 1920 horror films. She is approached by a lady who is tracing details of the life and films of an old film actress of that era called Lucretia von Wolff. She has discovered that Lucy is von Wolf's granddaughter and wonders if she has any information to offer.
Shortly after this a body is found in the old film studio that was used in the films of von Wolf,and which years ago was the scene of a double murder and the suicide of von Wolf. This death was similar to one of these earlier murders in that the body was found in a throne-like chair with both eyes skewered and destroyed.
A murderer is at large who is intent on keeping all connections between the film studio,the murders of the past and the life and death of the notorious Lucretia von Wolfe,firmly away from public gaze.
We are taken between life in a quiet fen-land village in the present day and to 1920 Vienna via the Nazi Death Camps of the Second World War.
Rayne writes as always with great intensity and brings a sense of deep fear and horror to her books. The only slight fault I could find is that the ending is a little too saccharine sweet (a most unusual fault for this writer) and this particular book could have been improved with a little cutting. ( )

Someone, somewhere recced Sarah Rayne, so I bunged a bunch of her titles on my Amazon wishlist and three of them turned up on my birthday. Yay! This one's decidedly un-cosy, involving as it does numerous people being murdered by being stabbed through the eyes, a mass rape and, oh, yes, the Holocaust. I would never have bought it if I'd known any of that, and had to squint in a few places to make the print blurry so I could get through the nastier bits, but I enjoyed (most of) it very much in spite of that. It's an involving and fascinating psychological thriller with elements of my favourite trope, Dark Secrets of the Past. Not by any means a masterpiece, but a real page-turner. ( )