This is a really good read. The story is really well written historical fiction. I was gripped the whole way through. It was different than I thought it was going to be. The story is really interesting and definitely worth reading.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

I enjoyed reading this book though I was not find of the format at all. The mystery was interesting and easy to follow and I would recommend the book

David Mark creates a dark and interesting read with The Mausoleum. Well developed characters and pace sustain the action.

It is not a surprise to find skeletal remains in a mausoleum, but when a tree falls on a mausoleum during a storm the body that is revealed is quite recent. Cordelia Hemlock is still mourning the death of her son when she meets Felicity Goose in the local cemetery. She finds some peace while reading among the graves and Felicity accidentally stumbles on her while carrying flowers for her mother. Caught in the storm that fells the tree, they witness the body among the damage. By the time the storm ends, the body has vanished. With no evidence, Cordelia’s report is ignored by the authorities.

Cordelia knows what she saw and begins to investigate on her own. The death of Felicity’s friend Fairfax provides the first clue. Fairfax had been recording the stories of the people he met with the intention of publishing a history of the village. One of his stories involved a member of the French resistance during WWII. A POW camp had been constructed close to the village and Felicity May have found a connection while going through the papers that Fairfax left behind. However, this is a small village and the residents prefer to keep their secrets and leave the past behind.

The characters of Cordelia and Felicity are as different as night and day. Cordelia is educated and has lost direction in her life since the loss of her child. Her marriage was one of convenience. Once her husband obtained a home near the Scottish border for her, he returned to London to continue with his life. Felicity is married with two older boys. Her education was basic and she is content with her life. Once they connect, their friendship develops and they work well together, ultimately facing danger but determined to find a solution. While the story begins slowly, it steadily builds tension and David Mark hits the reader with a truly surprising twist at the end.

The Mausoleum is a slightly unusual crime novel and quite a change for David Mark, who is best known for his DS McAvoy series of police procedurals.

The book opens in 2010 with two old ladies watching an even older man nearing death in a hospital bed. They harshly wake him so that he can answer their questions. The book then moves back to 1967 when the two ladies first meet over a grave in a small village near the Scottish border. Cordelia Hemlock is trying to pull her life back together after a failed academic career, a marriage of convenience and the death of her young son. She is an outsider in the ‘lost in time’ village of Upper Denton and is initially dismissive of the quiet, submissive, uneducated Felicity Goose. Their first meeting is interrupted by a sudden violent storm and a lightning strike which reveals a recently deceased body in a mausoleum hundreds of years old. When the storm passes, they find that the body has disappeared and that the one person they told about the body has died in a suspicious car accident. Together they decide to investigate and find a web of secrets stretching back to the Second world War.

The story alternates between Cordelia’s experiences at the time and transcripts of Felicity’s recollections of what happened in 1967, along with the occasional account of events back in World War II. The telling takes a little while to get used to and the opening sections of the book move at a leisurely pace. Once underway, however, the pace picks up and the final sections grip your attention as the book moves to its unexpected conclusion.

Mark skilfully gives each of the women their own distinctive voice, and uses the different perspectives of the same events to deepen the mystery and the suspense. The depiction of small village life in the 1960s is convincing and Mark fleshes out the local villagers so that they are more than familiar caricatures. There is also considerable poignancy and subtlety in his descriptions of the personal lives of Felicity and Cordelia and the gradual blossoming of their friendship. The plot is well structured, and the book moves in some very unexpected directions before reaching its conclusion.

It is a very well written and engaging crime novel and I thought that Mark cleverly handled the World War II aspects of the story with a good gritty sense of realism. In all, I thoroughly enjoyed it and was glad that I persevered through the slow opening section. It is a quiet, unassuming crime novel, but is one of my favourites so far this year.

Four and a half stars out of five

The Mausoleum was a great historical/current day mystery. The writing and characters are fantastic in this book. This story will pull you in until the last page.

1967, a small village in the Scottish Highlands, and a local woman, Felicity Goose, discovers Cordelia Hemlock, lying in an open grave. Cordelia is grieving for the loss of her son, but soon the two women begin to bond, primarily due to discovering a dead body. A lightning strike breaks open a mausoleum, revealing a fresh body inside. But when they tell a friend about it, not only does that friend die in a car crash, but the body vanishes to.

The truth behind the deaths reaches back to the War, to the atrocities committed in the name of patriotism. It seems that not all crimes were paid for in full. And some people have very long memories…

What’s that, I hear you cry? You’re desperate to know how The Creeping Jenny Mystery review ends? Well, so am I, but yesterday I was at the Third Section Regional Brass Band competition. Basically, each band plays the same ten-minute piece of music which to those with well-tuned musical ears is a fascinating experience, spotting the subtle errors (and some not-so-subtle) errors that each band commits. But to those with less well-tuned ears will need something to help pass the time, but a valuable near ninety-year old first edition is a bit tricky to sneak in. A Kindle, however, is a different matter…

You’ll recall David Mark as the author of the Aector McEvoy mysteries, but this is a standalone mystery. Actually, it might be the start of a series, as the book opens with a prologue with Cordelia and Felicity in the present day, and the epilogue of the same setting reveals that there have been significant changes in their lives. But this book stands perfectly well by itself.

It’s as one might expect if you’ve read the McEvoy mysteries, a deep and complex tale, full of twists that change the reader’s expectations of where the story is going. It’s a rewarding read, and while not a classic whodunit, is still full of surprises and, in addition, characters that you care about. Definitely well worth your time.

4 stars

This story is an unusual one.

It is 1967 and Cordelia Hemlock is still grieving the loss of her two-year old son. She is lying in a graveyard when Felicity Goose happens upon her. (Aren't those great character names?) At first Cordelia is distrusting but then the women become fast friends. While they are talking and trying to run from an oncoming storm, a lightning strike hits a mausoleum. The women see a body that does not belong in the graveyard.

The body then disappears. A neighbor and local historian Fairfax says he will investigate, but his car crashes on the way to view the site. He is killed. The women decide to look into the mystery themselves. They are, on the surface, very different women but become close. They share their burdens, Cordelia a little more reluctantly than Felicity. Felicity is patient, while Cordelia is not. Cordelia is educated, but she learns much from Felicity.

What they discover is that the mystery goes back to World War II. Fairfax has written down the words of a man who tells him his story of what occurred to him during WW II. He describes the torture and cruelty of the Nazi Gestapo and the French Milice that went on and was horrendous. He called the man “Abel.” Is this the man whose body the women saw?

This book is told from both Cordelia and Felicty's points of view using the accents the women would have spoken. I appreciated the way Mr. Mark was able to switch back and forth to give the two women their own voices. This is a well written and plotted novel that switches back and forth between 1967 and 2010.

I want to thank NetGalley and Severn House/Severn House Publishers for forwarding to me a copy of this interesting and very good story for me to read, enjoy and review.

‘1967. In a quiet village in the wild lands of the Scottish borders, disgraced academic Cordelia Hemlock is trying to put her life back together. Grieving the loss of her son, she seeks out the company of the dead, taking comfort amid the ancient headstones and crypts of the local churchyard. When lightning strikes a tumbledown tomb, she glimpses a corpse that doesn’t belong among the crumbling bones. But when the storm passes and the body vanishes, the authorities refuse to believe the claims of a hysterical ‘outsider’. Teaming up with a reluctant witness, local woman Felicity Goose, Cordelia’s enquiries all lead back to a former POW camp that was set up in the village during the Second World War. But not all Gilsland’s residents welcome the two young women’s interference. There are those who believe the village’s secrets should remain buried … whatever the cost.’

The Mausoleum by David Mark takes place mostly in 1967. Cordelia Hemlock has just lost her young son to illness. She's taken to finding odd places to sit and read, to remember, to mourn. Cordelia lives in remote Gilsland and has yet to bond with any of the locals. One day, Cordy startles Felicity Goose who stumbles across her as Cordelia is resting among the gravestones of the little church cemetery. The two begin to talk, and when it starts to storm, Felicity invites Cordelia back to her own cottage, which is closer. Before they can even clear the cemetery, the storm worsens, spitting lightning. One bolt hits a dead tree and topples into a mausoleum, breaking it open. And there, amidst the rubble, lies a fresh body only days old. Thus begins the friendship of Cordelia Hemlock and Felicity Goose.

The two women, pluckier than they seem at first, begin to dig into the corpse's mysterious appearance after they tell Felicity's neighbor, Fairfax who then dies in a car accident after he rushes out in the storm to locate the body and alert the constable. The fresh mausoleum corpse vanishes, leaving few clues behind. Fairfax's home lends a few more clues, harkening back to a terrible war-time atrocity and governmental devil's deals. This mystery and its unfortunate aftermath give Cordelia something to focus on to let her grief over her son begin to soften and heal.

I adore Cordy and Flick! They each helped t'other to grow and learn. Both women had steel underneath, that began to show through more and more. They each still have vulnerability though, and I love how at times Felicity's pragmatic country nature takes over, leading her to treat Cordelia as a daughter, or younger sister. Likewise, there are times Cordelia treats Flick as a sister. Despite the circumstances, or as like as naught because of them, they develop a close friendship that lasts decades. Each grows over the course of the story, especially Cordelia. She ends up with a pretty sweet job from the whole affair! I'd love to read about her further adventures.

I would have loved to have interacted more with Fairfax. He was a gentleman after my own heart, with his interest in writing. He was quite the historian! As for other secondary characters, I liked John, Felicity's husband. I think I could have liked her son James too, but we didn't get to see him as much as his brother Brian. I'd love to have gotten an explanation over James’ notebook, but we don't get final follow-up with him, and there's not enough page time with him for me to gauge personality. If he was supposed to be a foil to Brian, it didn't work for me. He was easy to overlook. Brian, on the other hand, was a pita, and needed his ass tanned.

I really enjoyed the slow unraveling of the mystery. It was less suspense/thriller, and more a historical investigation. Through Fairfax's papers, and Cordy and Flick's persistent research, we get to learn about events that happened during World war II, and there were some surprising revelations toward the end. Thinking back, I see the hints, but it really stunned me at first. Overall, a great read! If you enjoy historical mysteries, be sure to check it out!

***Many thanks to Netgalley/ Severn House for providing an ecopy in exchange for a fair and honest review. Reviewed for Love Books Tours

This story did not flow nor did the characters evolve into likable beings. Loved the title and was hoping for a cemetery drama. "A copy of this book was provided by Severn House via Netgalley with no requirements for a review. Comments here are my honest opinion." GREAT COVER ART

I would like to thank Netgalley and Severn House Publishing for a review copy of The Mausoleum, a stand alone novel set in north of England.

When Cordelia and her friend Felicity see a dead body tumble out of a mausoleum they are astonished as the body is recently deceased and the mausoleum is hundreds of years old. When the body subsequently disappears they are determined to investigate, discovering old secrets dating back to the war.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Mausoleum for the plotting and writing, the format not so much. The novel opens in 2010 with two old ladies trying to wake an older dying man to talk to him. It then skips back to 1967 to cover the events of the novel only returning to 2010 at the end of the novel. In between the narrative alternates between Cordelia’s experiences at the time and transcripts of Felicity’s memories of the time. I found all this jumping about distracting and it was difficult to get really immersed in the read - there were too many breaks making the novel easy to put down.

The plotting is excellent and the setting just right, a small village which hasn’t caught up to the Swinging Sixties but which has a long memory and secrets to keep. Cordelia is an outsider and in some ways, one of the swingers, so the ideal character to investigate. The wartime atrocities described in the book are horrific but, I have no doubt, realistic and the actions of Security Services afterwards unsurprising in their callousness. What a great contrast between surroundings and actions.

I know I moaned about the format but I particularly enjoyed the transcripts of Felicity’s memories. Her personality really shines through and they are so authentic sounding with a touch of hindsight and a disarming honesty. Cordelia is an entirely different kettle of fish, tough, uncompromising and slightly vulnerable. It is no wonder she ends up where she does.

The Mausoleum is a good read which I have no hesitation in recommending.

Thank you NetGalley and Severn House for the eARC.
THE MAUSOLEUM is one of my favorite books of the year so far, what a terrific read!
Cordelia Hemlock and Felicity (Flick) Goose are at the bedside of a dying man. The year is 2010 and the women are trying to wake the man to question him.
We then go back to 1967 when the two young women meet at a cemetery under odd circumstances and end up becoming great friends.
When they walk home during a torrential downpour lighting strikes a mausoleum during which they spy a body. A neighbor decides to go check it out, but is killed whole driving through the storm and the body has mysteriously disappeared.
Cordelia, in deep mourning after her 2-year old beloved son's death, finds some solace in trying to ferret out the disappearance of the dead man and both she and Flick start investigating. The secrets they stir up go back to WWII and uncover a hornet's nest of lies, cruelty and betrayal.
I loved both women and the story is told by both of them in alternate chapters. Their characters are very different, but they are a good fit. There are some very graphic passages of the torture by the Nazis and their French helpers, and then there's the shadowy world of espionage that makes one question how much we should condone, pardon and employ perpetrators for the sake of king and country.
This is a terrific book, beautifully written and with a strong sense of place. Highly recommended!

This is a standalone thriller by David Mark, author of the Aector McAvoy crime series.
This strange tale opens with an elderly man lying in bed wracked with pain as two women watch over him. They seem to be waiting for him to reveal a secret. The story switches back to 1967 when those two women - the marvellously named Cordelia Hemlock and Felicity Goose - met in the graveyard of a small North of England town called Gilsland.
Cordelia is still in grief at the death of her young son, while Felicity is a local woman, a wife and mother of two young sons, who tries to comfort her. Cordelia has a chequered past with secrets she'd rather keep hidden.
As they talk, a storm breaks. Lightning strikes a large tree, sending it crashing into an old mausoleum, throwing up ancient bones in the graveyard. Cordelia swears she saw a fresh corpse among the bones - a man in a blue suit with a satchel.
Soon afterwards a neighbour of Felicity's, Fairfax, comes to visit and Cordelia tells him what she saw. Fairfax says he will go and take a look, but is later found dead, his car having crashed into a tree. It transpires he was planning to write a history of the area and had spent years interviewing scores of locals for their memories of the town - once the site of a large World War 2 prisoner of war camp and later a rocket testing site. Both edifices had a major impact on the lives of the local people. Codelia is determined to find out more and shortly afterwards speaks to a farmer who talks of a Frenchman who had visited the town recently and spoken with Fairfax. The Frenchman wore a blue suit and carried a satchel.
The two women soon learn there are many, and not just those from the town, who don't want them to dig too deep into the past. The story moves between 1967 and 2010, with some chapters devoted to recorded statements from Cordelia and Felicity as to what happened more than 40 years ago. Throughout the book we are introduced to various colourful characters and learn much of the history of Gilsland, which stretches back to the building of Hadrian's Wall and beyond. Although set in the 1960's, at times this book reads like a Gothic mystery. The plot unfolds slowly but becomes a gripping read as Gilsland slowly gives up its secrets - and some secrets lie farther afield than those of this small North of England town.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, Severn House, for a copy of this book in return for an unbiased review.