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A review by darkskybooks
Murder at Spindle Manor by Morgan Stang
4.0
What if Agatha Christie wrote gaslamp dark fantasy crossed with gothic horror? This book attempts to answer that question with a curious murder mystery at the center of its weird and dark world.
The whole of this story is contained within one large house, a guesthouse for travelers using stage coaches in the area. The events of the story are set whilst the guests are all trapped there by a storm (very Agatha Christie) providing a limited suspect list and a somewhat claustrophobic setting. Two groups of travelers are staying and they all have their secrets, some of them more easy to discover than others, but they are all confronted by an investigator following a creature that has been eating people and stealing their likeness as a doppelganger. The characters are all well drawn, with decent and obvious motivations. None of them are particularly pleasant which helps to spread the suspicion around nicely.
The dark fantasy elements and the large mysterious house certainly add to the gothic sensibilities. The creatures populating the world, be they ghosts or strange spider mutants definitely create a suitable level of creepiness to the place. In some ways I found myself frustrated by how constrained the story was with it all confined to the one house - this obviously a fascinating world that we only get the briefest glimpse of.
This was an intriguing genre mashup that mostly worked for me. There were some leaps in the resolution that I did struggle to follow, some stakes were raised and conveniently ignored, but overall this was a well constructed murder mystery in a weird, wonderful and creepy world.
The whole of this story is contained within one large house, a guesthouse for travelers using stage coaches in the area. The events of the story are set whilst the guests are all trapped there by a storm (very Agatha Christie) providing a limited suspect list and a somewhat claustrophobic setting. Two groups of travelers are staying and they all have their secrets, some of them more easy to discover than others, but they are all confronted by an investigator following a creature that has been eating people and stealing their likeness as a doppelganger. The characters are all well drawn, with decent and obvious motivations. None of them are particularly pleasant which helps to spread the suspicion around nicely.
The dark fantasy elements and the large mysterious house certainly add to the gothic sensibilities. The creatures populating the world, be they ghosts or strange spider mutants definitely create a suitable level of creepiness to the place. In some ways I found myself frustrated by how constrained the story was with it all confined to the one house - this obviously a fascinating world that we only get the briefest glimpse of.
This was an intriguing genre mashup that mostly worked for me. There were some leaps in the resolution that I did struggle to follow, some stakes were raised and conveniently ignored, but overall this was a well constructed murder mystery in a weird, wonderful and creepy world.