Back in 1985 at Potwoolstan Hall in Devon, the entire Harford family were murdered by a crazed housekeeper who then shot herself. She was found with her tiny daughter clinging to her lifeless arms.
Now, in 2005, Patrick Evans, a freelance writer who specialises in investigating past crimes, doesn’t believe the housekeeper did it and sets out to find out the truth. Not a wise move as he is shortly afterwards found dead in the grounds of the hall.
DCI Gerry Heffernan heads the murder enquiry along with DI Wesley Petersen and they soon find out that most of the people involved in the case are still around twenty years later. The hall has been turned into a New Age healing centre where the clients are referred to as Beings and none of them are who they pretend to be.
Meanwhile, the housekeeper’s daughter, now grown up and still living in the area, remembers the night of the great slaughter and knows her mother did not commit the crimes but was, in fact, killed by the murderer. She decides to regress into her childhood via hypnosis in the hope she will recall the real killer's face; a dangerous decision as this gives the murderer a prime motive for eliminating her.
As with all Kate Ellis’s books, there is a corollary with events in the distant past. In 1605, inhabitants of the area emigrated to the state of Virginia in the US and Wesley’s friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, is out there excavating the site where they are buried. Regular followers of the series may be slightly surprised to learn that Wesley’s stressed out wife Pam is no nearer to jumping into bed with Neil (as a respite from her demanding job coupled with bringing up two small children with a constantly absent husband), a prospect that has been on the cards for several books and which some of us were awaiting with unseemly anticipation.
Neither has Wesley taken steps to seduce the attractive DS Rachel Tracey when everyone knows that, if this were a TV soap, they’d all have been bang at it by now.
Notwithstanding this, A Cursed Inheritance is an excellent mystery of
the locked room type with everyone connected with Potwoollstan Hall having something
to hide and more murders to contend with before the final startling climax.
As always, Kate Ellis’s plots keep the reader riveted to the very end.
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Ron Ellis
This is Kate Ellis’s ninth book about DS Wesley Peterson and his friend, archaeologist
Neil Watson - other titles are The Merchant's House, The Armada Boy, An Unhallowed
Grave, The Funeral Boat, The Bone Garden, A Painted Doom, The Skeleton Room,
and The Plague Maiden.