Fresh from US publisher Coffeetown Press comes Bone Whispers, the latest mystery effort from Rosalind Brackenbury, a British-born author with more than three dozen works behind her.
Bone Whispers follows the return of Nessa, returning to her once-home coastal Dorset town to sell her inherited home. Naturally it’s not a smooth nor easy trip as Nessa soon discovers that a skeleton has been unearthed recently, forcing dark secrets to emerge from the past.
The plot itself? Simple enough – Brackenbury vacillates from Nessa’s secretive Dorset childhood to the modern day where a now septuagenarian Nessa finds herself grappling with the truth she’s long tried to bury. At just south of 200-odd pages, Bone Whispers certainly doesn’t lack when it comes to pacing or an enjoyable writing style; sadly though it does suffer from an uneven plot structure and framing, simultaneously too short to be a fully fleshed-out novel and yet not long enough to work as a snappy short story.
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The characters are fine enough – the novel is shaped through Nessa’s perspective and while she’s likeable enough, her role as a potentially-unreliable narrator isn’t defined well enough for the reader to question her in the first place, although a lot of the twists and turns are fairly visible to any ardent mystery reader.
While it doesn’t reinvent the narrative wheel and it suffers from a truncated page count and plot, Bone Whispers and its author have real promise, if applied with stronger impact. A lot of Bone Whispers is simply fine – neither trashy enough to be a guilty pleasure nor elevated enough to be a standout work – and for this reader, sometimes fine is fine enough.
Bone Whispers is out now from Coffeetown Press.
