The loudest debut since “Thirteenth Tale” by Diana Setterfield.
Family secrets and ominous predictions, original characters, and melodramatic plot twists are all abundantly present in this thrilling, truly English book. If Diana Setterfield, in her “Thirteenth Tale,” reminded readers of novels by the Brontë sisters, then F. E. Higgins plunges us into the mysterious atmosphere of Dickensian and Oscar Wilde stories. Ludlow Horkins, treacherously betrayed by his own parents (the narration, as once in Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” mostly comes from the perspective of a young hero), lands in a small, very strange town where almost every resident has something to hide—where a bookseller is willing to kill for a priceless copy, where a moneylender takes human secrets as collateral. What secrets does “The Black Book of Secrets” hold—secrets for which people are ready to do anything? That is what our hero will have to find out in this engrossing mystery novel.