Sepulchre spans centuries, beginning on the eve of Samhain, 1897, with the disappearance of a young French girl named Leonie Vernier from her aunt's estate, Domaine de la Cade, and the death by violence of an elderly priest, who is holding a tarot card when his body is discovered: XV, The Devil. The priest's murderer is never apprehended, and Leonie Vernier's fate will not be unravelled in her own time.
When a writer named Meredith Martin arrives in the area in the autumn of 2007 to research the life of the composer Claude Debussy, she learns about Leonie and finds herself drawn to the tale of the young woman's disappearance. Meredith discovers an old tomb in the woods near Leonie's former home and hears haunting music among the trees after nightfall, the same music which was heard at the time of Leonie's disappearance. It would appear that the interwoven stories of Leonie Vernier and the vanished tarot cards are not over, and that something sinister is afoot. Meredith undertakes to solve the mystery of Leonie's disappearance and find the vanished Vernier Tarot - the quest is dangerous, and it may well be her undoing.
Kate Mosse's previous novel, Labyrinth, was a marvellous reading experience, and I am rereading the book now, so it was a happy thing to discover last evening that she is about to publish another novel, and one which promises to be as remarkable a reading experience as her first.
Although Sepulchre is not going to be available for a few months, I now have one title on my library table for the long nights time, and that is good news for someone who doesn't watch television - there just isn't enough good fiction being published these days in my book, and the current sad publication drift toward shock value, horror and histrionics rather than quality and beautiful reading is (no doubt) responsible.
Sepulchre will (hopefully) be joined on the library tale by other works in time, the splendid creations of Sister Kim Mermaid, those of Laurie R. King, Sharyn McCrumb and Alice Hoffman. Clarissa Pinkola Estes has a new book coming out this fall, (The Dangerous Old Woman), and there are nonfiction volumes on art, spirituality, anthropology, organic gardening, forestry, botany, cicadas and damselflies to be read. I am beginning to feel cheerful about autumn and winter - all that remains is to lay in a larder full of tea and beeswax candles.
