The Winter Ghosts

In a voice filled with subtle possibility, Julian Rhind-Tutt sets the chilling atmosphere for Kate Mosse's intelligent ghost story. Frederick Watson was hospitalized for depression after the death of his beloved brother in the Great War. Years later, while driving through the Pyrenees, a car accident sends him to a remote village whose inhabitants are dressed in medieval costume. That night he meets Fabrissa, a beautiful woman who tells him a tragic tale. With all the spookiness of a horror story told in the dark, Rhind-Tutt takes listeners through mental institutions, locked towers, dank graveyards, and ruined castles. Controlled and understated, Rhind-Tutt's husky breathiness conjures Frederick's heartfelt grief, an ancient mystery, and an assortment of credible fourteenth- and twentieth-century ghosts. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

November 15, 2010
In Mosse's wisp of a new novel (after Sepulchre), Freddie Watson is a stilted young man who has not gotten over older brother George's disappearance on the Western Front during WWI. It is now 10 years since the Armistice, and Freddie, after a stay in a mental institution, has come to the French Pyrenees to find peace. While motoring through a snowstorm, he crashes his car and ends up in the small village of Nulle, where he meets a beautiful young woman named Fabrissa. In the course of an evening, Fabrissa tells Freddie a story of persecution, resistance, and death, hinting at a long-buried secret. By the next morning, she is gone, leaving Freddie alone to unlock a ghostly mystery hidden for 600 years. This is a staunchly old-fashioned story, taking fully 100 pages to get moving, and by the time things pick up, the gist of the narrative will be obvious to anyone who has ever sat through a Twilight Zone episode. Freddie's obtuseness does little to help along a gruel-thin story.