Review: The Darkest Night

Victoria Hawthorne, The Darkest Night  (Quercus Publishing 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63259977-the-darkest-night?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hfljxCebya&rank=1

A haunting story of witches, family secrets and the pain that never heals

Ailsa Reid escapes to Fife after a scandal at work, to find her grandmother Moira missing and her grandfather Rupert injured.
In her search for Moira, she needs help from her estranged mother Rowan. The mother/daughter love/hate relationship is tense. Ailsa is ‘annoyed with how [her] name sounds in her mouth’.
The solution to the mystery involves witches, those gravestones on the hill, a mother and daughter, burned on the hill above the house, and an ancient curse.
Bed-bound Selina finds healing as her friendship with Elspeth grows. The two share a secret, yet Selina has a further secret, too. The arrival of cousin Samuel complicates matters. He ‘knows’.
I found the non-involvement of the police and the hospital strange. Someone has bashed her grandfather over the head, but the women just stay in the kitchen smoking cigarettes. And I wondered how Selina knew everyone in town when she had never left her bed.
Despite the worrying scenario of the injured grandfather and the missing grandmother, the story begins quite low-key, then building, alongside wonderful characterisation and family dynamics. It features several examples of beautiful writing about strong emotions. (‘Her thoughts crash into one another in her mind with explosive clangs.’)
The overall plot is very good, every element linking into every other element, frequently taking a dreamlike tone, as if we’re not really sure what is reality. Part II moves back to Moira’s childhood, which is a bit of a shift.
I love how we are fed the story of Ailsa’s work scandal bit by bit—first, a ‘name’, then an ‘allegation’, then an ‘incident’, then an ‘investigation’—and how it gradually connects to the missing grandmother story. Both witch-hunts, ancient and modern—’accusations flayed across their skin’—ending in the Reid family women finally finding each other.
This review originally appeared in Historical Novels Review.