I n 1891, young L onie Vernier and her brother Anatole arrive in the beautiful town of Rennes les Bains, in southwest France. In the present, another woman sees the find as a means to the political power she craves while a man who has great power will kill to destroy all traces of the discovery and everyone who stands in his way.įrom the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Labyrinth comes another haunting tale of secrets, murder, and the occult set in both nineteenth century and twenty first century France. As crusading armies led by Church potentates and nobles of northern France gather outside the city walls of Carcassonne, it will take great sacrifice to keep the secret of the Labyrinth safe. The book, he says, contains the secret of the true Grail, and the ring, inscribed with a Labyrinth, will identify a guardian of the Grail. Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade to stamp out heresy that will rip apart southern France, Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father as he leaves to fight the crusaders. In the Pyrenees mountains near Carcassonne, Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig stumbles into a cave and makes a startling discovery two crumbling skeletons, strange writings on the walls, and the pattern of a Labyrinth between the skeletons, a stone ring, and a small leather bag.

Slipped into the text like a secret nod of acknowledgment are the names of the masters to whom Mosse pays homage: Algernon Blackwood, MR James and Sheridan Le Fanu.In this extraordinary thriller, rich in the atmospheres of medieval and contemporary France, the lives of two women born centuries apart are linked by a common destiny. Mosse weaves her engaging tale with a delicate touch, dropping clues to her mystery in the form of colours and sounds. The village was once at the heart of the Cathar cult, a Gnostic sect stamped out by the Roman Catholic church in the early 14th century. In spooky circumstances he stumbles upon a hidden village and undergoes an experience that finally shifts the great weight of grief beneath which he has been trapped. Mentally depleted, he travels to the Pyrenees in the hope that the clean air might help heal his shattered nerves.

Freddie Watson has lost more than a decade of his life since the brother he worshipped was killed in the Great War. T he satisfying trademarks of Mosse's fiction are all in place in this romantic ghost story: its setting in the mountainous region of south-west France a vulnerable narrator with a stake in the past and, key to all, time-slips.

Kate mosse the winter ghosts review