3 out of 5 stars
The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.
On a hot, still evening at dusk, a woman leaves her house to go out for a walk. After a while, she hears someone coming up behind her. The figure passes quickly. She notices that they are wearing a grey cloak, but there are no other recognisable features.
She returns to her house, only to find this figure in the grey cloak in her porch. It is then that she realises that the figure in the cloak is a woman. She sees her reach out and touch the window, before suddenly turning round and walking quickly down the path, past where she is standing.
As she approaches her front door and opens it. Then she sees what the figure in the porch had been looking at. There are men with her husband looking at a skeleton on the table. She goes into the room to find out what is going on, and it turns out these remains were discovered under a wall, and there was a lead tablet with an inscription on.
She knows some of the men around the table, one of whom she knew very well from her past. Soon after she joins them, he talks to her over coffee separately; she humours him a little, but it is a past that she doesn’t want to return to.
After the gathering, they box the bones up carefully, and two of the men carry the bones back to another house. As they walk, they are aware of another person or presence near them, but they can’t see anybody.
Over the next few days, the summer heat builds and builds and reaches unbearable levels. Everyone in the town is a bit frazzled and on edge. More and more residents are seeing the figure in the grey cloak, and they walk around the town, and it is beginning to unnerve some people. The tension increases with the heat.
There were parts of this story that I liked a lot. The archaeological mystery, the tensions between the characters and the mysterious haunting. The author has made the story very atmospheric, and the plot could be a little unnerving at times. I did think that it had some flaws though; there was a plethora of characters, and perhaps because I wasn’t fully engaged with it meant that I couldn’t always work out who was who in the plot. I don’t mind books where the author has a range of characters, including some that you are not supposed to like, but I did think that most characters in here were insufferable. However, this may have been the author’s intention! Not a bad read overall.
Leave a Reply