I love Kate Mosse's novels and picked this up to read. A good read but since I'm into the characters, who they are and what they're about not as good as her novels I'm afraid. ( )

A good atmospheric collection of spooky tales which are based, like her books, in France and Southern England. The tales are inspired by legends and folklore. They were all enjoyable but, I have to admit, there’s not a lot to shout about…..not very creepy or scary, but I suppose it’s hard to rate a collection as the stories are all different. ( )

Really enjoyable short story collection which overall came out at 3.7* as I rated each story then got an average but have rounded up for Goodreads. I don’t often get on with short stories but this one had no duds just some that were better than others. Recommend for this time of year. ( )

I so badly wanted to love this book, but aside from one short story, I was a bit disappointed. Not one I have read twice. ( )

Well this was a surprise. My only previous work by Mosse was Labryinth, which I thought was an awful, overblown, sprawling disaster of a book. These were nothing like that work. In the short form there is no space for the muddled multilayered story that I had read previously. In this format, she has to remain much more focussed and it does wonders for her writing. It was a revelation.
The book consisted of stories that all had an air of menace, or of the otherwordly. Usually with a protagonist at a low ebb, or vulnerable in some way. It is well done, and only in one story did I feel that she'd stretched the possible too far.

The Mistletoe Bride is narrated by the soul of a bride who goes missong on her Christmas wedding night and is only found once it is far too late.
Duet was a most unusual story that sounds a lot like a therapy session, but turns out it is not at all what you imagine
Red Letter Day is one that has her protagonist at the lowest ebb encountering something otherworldly in the haunting city of Carcassonne. Sad, but not without a certain rightness.
The Drowned Village is one of old folk myth and the fate of an island that vanished beneath the waves.
The House on the Hill is the one that I'm struggling to place.
Why the Yew Tree Lives So Long was by far my favourite. Just magical.
Sainte- Terése is set in Languedoc, but could be almost anywhere. A woman in an unhappy marriage finds solace and more in a church.
The Ship of the Dead is based on an old Breton legend, which I was not aware of. It was quite unexpected and probably the most scary of the set.
La Fille de Mélisande takes Debussy’s opera Pelleas et Mélisande and imagines how the events may have affected Melisande's daughter, born as her mother dies.
The Revenant is set not 5 miles from my home village, so this was immediately recognisable to me, the marshes I grew up with were brought to life. A crime in the past comes back to haunt the family involved. It says as much about how small communities act and react and how no event is ever entirely fotgotten.
On Harting Hill is about another place (in this case a road) that I know well. And, from the author's note, I can see exactly where she was comming from in this one. It was excellently done.
The Princess Alice is a sad tale of a family decimated by an accident and the fact that these are forgotten - not in this case, with a diary comming into the hand of an avid bookworm.
In the Theatre at Night is surely based on that child's belief that their toys come alive after bedtime. In this case it is not toys, but the costumes and props in a theatre. Lovely and gentle as a story.
The Yellow Scarf was related to the first story, making reference to it and is the least sucessful, to my mind, of the collection. In this case the future finds a way to interact with and change the past. Not for me.
The final tale is set in New York and is again about a woman at her lowest ebb, only this time it has a different ending to that in Red Letter Day.

I listened to this, read by a pair of narrators and it worked expecially well. Each was accompanied by an author's note, in which she explained the origin of the story, or the background as to how it came to be written.

This was not at all what I expected, it was far far better than that. I must have been unlucky in picking Labrynth as my first exprience of her writing. This outstrips that by a country mile. ( )