Published By: Baskerville
Pages: 320
Released On: 29/01/2026
On a freezing, windswept day in the Scottish Hebrides, Eleanor Bruton’s body is discovered on the shore. To her family Eleanor was an ordinary middle-aged woman, with a skill for flower arrangements and plumping kneeler cushions at church. Little did they know she was harbouring a dark and all-consuming secret: a scrap of fraying embroidery that seemed worthless at first glance.
For over a century two rival organisations of women have gone to deadly lengths to secure the valuable artefact in the hopes of finding the original medieval manuscript from which it was torn. The Order of St Katherine: devoted to the belief that women must pull strings in the shadows in order to exercise covert control. And the Fellowship of The Larks: determined to amass as many overt positions of power for women as possible . . . while making sure their methods of doing so never come to light.
When renowned expert Dr Anya Brown is handpicked by the exclusive Institute of Manuscript Studies at St Andrews, she is unaware that she’s been recruited – at her own peril – to translate ancient texts that the Larks believe critical to their mission. Meanwhile, at Scotland Yard, Detective Clio Spicer begins a secret investigation into the death of Eleanor Bruton.
As Dr Brown and Detective Spicer become entangled in this ancient web, circumstances spin wildly out of control. Will the battle to advance the rights and power of womankind bring their lives into grave danger?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Baskerville for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had such high hopes for this book – it sounded exactly like my kind of thing, but sadly it didn’t meet my expectations.
I was a little confused as to the setting. It’s clearly a modern book, but the language used and just the overall feeling I got from it was that it was based many, many years ago, and so it almost transcended time periods.
This one is predominately female, female “goodies” and “baddies”, which was great to see.
I’ve seen some reviews where people compare it to The Da Vinci Code, but I’ve not read that so I can’t be sure, but I suppose it does follow groups of people hunting for a lost piece of history in a dangerous game of cat and mouse, so I suppose it sounds similar.
I’ve have preferred it if it had stayed in one POV. It fits between the first person of our main character Anya, and then third person for a variety of characters. I think I’d have liked it more if it was all in Anya’s voice and we come to learn about everyone else through her, or at least cut it down to one or two other viewpoints. Having so many makes it hard to differentiate, and there are a lot of characters and so I struggled to remember who was how and how they related to the main storyline.
It is a very historical heavy book – the history of art and manuscripts and emboidery – it’s a lot, and I htink if you’re not overly interested in those topcs it might be a harder read, but I found it interesting. SHe must have done a lot of reearch to make it so detailed.
This is my first of her book and looking at her others, they all seem to be quite straight-forward traditional thrillers, so this felt like a different route. It is a thriller but it feels more historical novel for me. I can’t compare and say 100% it is different to her others but if it is, I think she’s got promise in this genre. Was it perfect? No, but I still enjoyed reading it. She’s good at depicting place and space, her description of an isolated Scotland was lovely.
I needed it to get going a bit sooner. I’m all for a slower start, introducing everyone and whatnot, but this went on a wee bit too long which made the opening feel slow and stilted.
Honestly? There’s not as much plot as I thought there would be. We have two rival groups of women who will do anything to get their hands on lost gold, as it were, and they’re not against killing to do so. But apart from their rivalries, the actual meat on the bones is very slim. It’s more about the women and their rivalries than what they’re actually rivalling about, if that makes snse.
There’s dark academia, thriller, and a sense of historical fiction, there’s romance and power struggles and violence and murder and secret societies – it’s a lot for what isn’t really that long a book, perhaps too much?
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