The Coffin Path

Katherine Clements novel The Coffin Path is released in Hardback/eBook from Headline on 8th February

FFO of The Woman in Black, The Innocents, Lady Macbeth

When you read books to review them for hits on your blog, you come across several different types of tomes.  You have those you feel you can connect with due to a resemblance to your favourite authors (Lee Child) or a genre such as thriller and crime. You get sucked into reading books of the same ilk one after another - I am forever indebted for the opportunity to review Streets of Darkness, Ragdoll, Sirens in quick succession. Those novels showed me that the genre of crime and urban noir is now on an equal footing with the tremendous success of Scandanavian Noir.

You also cross paths with books you take a risk on, those you are not familiar with and do not normally seek yourselves from shelves.  The Coffin Path is one of those books; it wears its influences on its cover - dark, mysterious, gothic - a novel stripped from the drafts of the Bronte sisters where the combination of God-fearing individuals compete against a foreboding landscape full of mist and fear, along with prophetic fallacies galore.

Mercy Booth is our heroine, the daughter of the owner of Scarcross Hall the house on the old titular pathway where the word is something evil lives.  The Hall is her home and where she wants to reside, yet small things start to go awry especially the three ancient coins missing from her elderly father's study. Then the stranger appears.

This stranger Ellis Ferreby, is cut from the same cloth as Mr. Rochester - that brooding embodiment of masculinity who wanders the moors searching solace and purpose - yet a man who knows what is right and wrong, can he provide purpose to Ms. Booth also.

Author Katherine Clements

As well as a ghost story that keeps you on your toes, it is also a cleverly conceived story of female empowerment of a woman learning about herself in a cold world:

'...in my younger years I would have named Father my closest friend, but there's no one in this world knows the whole of me. I've shared my pains with God alone. I've whispered to the wind, let the rain take my tears, dried my eyes on the fleeces of my flock and never let anyone see how I've felt the lack of a true friend.  I have not dwelled upon my loneliness. I never allowed it: I made my choice and must live by it.  But the trials of these last months have stirred a craving I thought long dead.'

This is an amazing evocation of love blossoming inside a young woman she thought dormant, and it has stuck with me.  The use of landscape to evoke a distant characteristic trait makes her a suitable companion for the man who walks the moors alone happily.

Clements has done wonders to create a distinctive tone and atmosphere of novel that has something for everyone, and whilst this reader found it tough at first, if you stick with it like this reader, you can gain something surprising from it.

The Coffin Path is released from Headline on Thursday 8th February.