To The Last Page

Sam Hurcom’s debut novel operates in classic UK folk-horror territory, in the countryside, in small villages that have codes of silence, where the natives are superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders, where strange things happen. It’s all a little bit dark and a little bit creepy. What is perhaps different about A Shadow on the Lens is how the folk horror setting blends in a murder-mystery investigation that is going to be particularly difficult to resolve if there is a supernatural element to it and if the investigator can’t trust his own senses. That’s the problem that Thomas Bexley has when he is called upon to look into the murder of a young woman in Dinas Powys, a small village in the Welsh countryside. Thomas is not an inspector as such, but rather works as a photographer in what in 1904 is a new field of forensic investigation. The body of Betsan Tilney has been found mutilated, chained and burned close to the woods by the village. The local authorities are keen to blame Trav...