Inky Side of Midnight

Categories: Horror & Supernatural , Fiction

 Shuffle your tarot cards and meditate for inner peace before cracking open Natasha Mostert’s The Midnight Side.  London dweller Alette Temple dies suddenly by suspicious circumstances.  In Alette’s will, Alette’s barrister summons Alette’s cousin Isabelle DeWitt to fly to London to attend to her estate.  The surprises Isabelle finds are intriguing to say the least.  Alette is embroiled in all sorts of mystical endeavors including tarot card reading and séances.  Alette had her own very lucrative fortune telling business and had a gift to foretell the future and also tell her customers what they want to hear.

Isabelle intends her trip to London to be short and sweet but Alette has other plans.  Alette leaves strict instructions with her lawyer to keep Isabelle in London for at least three weeks.   There are three sealed envelopes for Isabelle from Alette.  One envelope is to be opened per week.   Isabelle is to follow these directions to the letter as Alette’s last dying wish.  The requests contained in the envelopes are so heinous they’d make the boogeyman flee the closet.

Alette divorced her husband due to psychological abuse and decides to exact revenge on her husband from beyond the grave using Isabelle.  Isabelle is uncomfortable with the demands the vendetta entails but she ignores her better judgment and executes them nevertheless..  

 

The result is Isabelle falling for a man, the wrong man of course.  That may not seem so catastrophic but believe me it is.  Trusting the wrong person, dead or alive, just may cost Isabelle her life.  In a word, Isabelle is a hapless field mouse in a nest of black mambas and there is no way out.

 

No matter where you’re reading this book, it feels, as if there’s an inky black cloak of night around you.  Mostert’s cool, tame, razor sharp wit and prose catches you square in the jaw and induces pleasant pauses for introspection.  This is Mostert’s first novel. 

 Subsequent novels executed in the identical exquisite good taste include Season of the Witch and Keeper of Light and Dust.