One Dark Night
by Hannah Richell
Simon & Schuster
There is a local legend that the woods near the exclusive English boarding school Folly View College are haunted by a girl in a white dress. It tells of a young woman who was murdered on her wedding day at the stone folly in the woods and left for the crows, and the sightings of her ghost.
Of course that is the very place that a group of thrill-seeking students would sneak out of the boarding house to party on the night of Halloween. It is not until the next morning that the body of one of them is discovered at the bottom of the folly, wearing a white dress.
Local police officer Ben Chase is assigned to the case which is complicated by the facts that his daughter, who is at the school, is in the same year 12 class as the murdered girl, and his ex-wife Rachel is a counselor who is Head of Student Welfare.
As superstition and rumours take hold of the small community and the list of suspects mounts, the tense drama is told from the perspectives of Rachael, Ben and their rebellious teenage daughter Ellie, who had only recently started at the school and lived with her mother on the school grounds.
During the investigation, the historic and prestigious school that had always seemed like a haven turns into a claustrophobic, oppressive enclosure hiding a multitude of dark secrets. The school and surrounding woods become a place of dread, where something terrible had happened and something terrible might happen again.
The tension mounts as suspicion spreads and the accounts from each of the protagonists, who find out that people are not who they seem to be, end in tantalising cliff-hangers. To make things even more difficult, the woods hide caves with secret access points and a “tangled spaghetti-scrawl of tunnels”.
It is easy to go down the wrong path in search of answers, only to realise that the author is holding the reader in suspense until the very end.
Lezly Herbert
