The atmosphere is grippy and creepy. The mystery is compelling and twisty. It did feel as though it was more modern than it was meant to be. This is a good novel

This gothic mystery started out really well for me, I loved the 1950s setting and Sam as a character. Begars Abbey was described well and there were strong spooky vibes.

Then I felt that second half became too unbelievable, even for what it was meant to be that I couldn't stick with the storyline as well.

Overall this book was good and I would recommend it for those who like gothic novels.

Another gem from a brilliant author. I love this author and this is one that hasn’t disappointed. This is a book that has pulled me in and I have devoured in just one sitting.
Addictive plot, great characters and a book that is worthy of all the praise.

It's not highbrow fiction by any means but I found it to be a great holiday read. It has just enough tension and mystery to keep you turning the pages and it's wonderfully atmospheric. You'll feel the chill of the Abbey deep in your bones.

Deliciously suspenseful, I struggled to put the book down on many occasions as I could not stop reading for wanted to know how it all ended. Highly recommend

I loved the atmospheric vibe of this one. Set in an old abbey that was once home to nuns, many of whom are now buried beneath its footings.

It’s 1954 and struggling to make ends meet after the death of her mother, Sam finds a letter in her mother’s possessions which seems to suggest that her mother was the daughter of a wealthy family on the other side of the world. With nothing keeping her in New York anymore Sam heads to Yorkshire to hopefully find an inheritance waiting for her.

However, Begars Abbey is far from what Sam was expecting. Instead of a sprawling home she is face to face with a crumbling monstrosity that literally seems to be falling down around her.

Throw in her bed-ridden grandmother who can’t communicate and some strange staff including a housekeeper and a servant girl that seem stuck in a previous century, Sam is starting to realise why her mother had kept her childhood and her family a secret.

The house has a cold, eerie feel to it and Sam just can’s shake the feeling that something isn’t right. With strange noises, dark mysterious tunnels under foot and no one to turn to, she is starting to think she has made a huge mistake.

Sam’s resolve to leave soon starts to change after discovering old journals that once belonged to her mother and she starts to lose herself in the history of Begars Abbey and is determined to learn its secrets.
It has the perfect pace of a gothic thriller and enough things that go bump in the night without being too terrifying that you can’t curl up with this one before going to bed at night.

A really enjoyable read.

It’s 1954 and Sam is going through a rough time in her life but when she finds some letters showing that she has a family and some inheritance which she had no knowledge of in Yorkshire, she finds herself going on a trip to Begar’s Abbey to meet her Grandmother.

But when she stumbles across her mother, Vera’s diary, she finds herself on a mission to discover the truth about her family’s history and especially her mothers. Sam soon starts to wonder, what just happened in Begar’s Abbey? Was the servants who used to work in the house somehow connected to the hidden cell in the crypt?

We learn a lot about Sam’s difficult past as well as her family’s. Things were tough during those times and even more so for Sam. I felt for her as things seem like they were slightly looking up until she discovers the abbey which is now just degenerating and the long lost diary belonging to her mother.

The author makes lots of use of descriptive language, describing the abbey, it’s surroundings and the items that would be used during those times. I felt as though I was in the abbey with her as she walked through the corridors of the beautiful yet desolating abbey. She does an amazing job of creating a chilling and eerie atmosphere. There was lots of ghostly goings on throughout and the author also includes snippets of the mother’s diary which only further adding to the intrigue.

The author definitely has a way of building up mystery. I was absolutely enthralled in the mystery surrounding her mother and her grandfather. I don’t want to say too much but I definitely did not see that ending coming! This one is just is brilliant, just as mysterious and just as atmospheric as her debut novel, Plague Letters! It’s a quick read as it’s a real page turner but it also packs in quite a bit of intrigue. I loved this one so much that I completed it in one sitting. This is definitely one for lovers of historical or gothic thrillers.

3.9999⭐️

Not a big deal but pretty funny.. the shift+enter on the authors computer seems to have been broken bc all the I’s in my ARC were lowercase. As well as some s’s. And r’s. Lol

Soooo the beginning drove me nuts because a lot of time was spent just getting to the house and trying to open a single room. This kind of drawn out storytelling continued throughout the book. I think this would have been excellent if it were a bit snappier and got to the point faster.

Spoiler:
90% of the way in, it was really confusing as to whether the MC knew the house was haunted or not. She kept acknowledging that she was seeing things and yelling at the ghosts, but then going back to acting like there was no haunting.

BUT! …I LOVED the ending. This is definitely one to be patient with and finish.

This books is very powerful and beautifully crafted gothic novel. The writing style is tight and tense as Sam tried to work out her family history and more importantly what is real and what is not……
I don’t want to say too much as any spoilers would ruin a readers enjoyment I feel but I loved this book. And the ending left me in shock.
Highly recommend.

What the???? OMG THAT ENDING!!!

Sam lives in Brooklyn with her mother. In a run down rented apartment block and with very little money.

When her mother, Vera, dies, Sam begins looking through their apartment for things her mother may have hidden including the box of ‘fake’ jewels she often hid from Sam. Sam is surprised to find a box of letters. It looks like a letter was sent to her mum from a firm of solicitors in England every year, dating back to before Sam was born.

Sam contacts the solicitor and although they try to convince her not to come, they send her the funds to enable her travel to England. She wishes to visit the house her mother was brought up in and where her grandmother still lives. Her mother had never once mentioned her life before Sam was born.

Sam has a lot of questions she wants answers to. Why had her mother left England when she was only 17? Was her family rich? If so why had Sam and her mother lived like paupers all Sam’s life?

On her arrival in York, Alec, one of the solicitors, takes her to Begars Abbey although it is obvious he detests the place. The snow is coming down heavily and when they approach the house Sam sees a woman walking towards the car.

Only there was no woman.

The spooky atmosphere continues throughout the book as Sam sees and hears strange things in the house.

The house is barely habitable. There is no heating and the telephone is not working. There are only a few people now living there. The old housekeeper Mrs Pritchett who appears to be losing her mind, Lady Cooper, Sam’s grandmother, wheelchair bound and unable to speak. A young maid, Ivy and a night nurse, Nesta.

When Sam finds some old diaries hidden in her mother’s old bedroom, she begins to explore the house, a former nunnery, and piece together the secrets the family are keeping and the reason for her mother’s abrupt departure and years of silence.

She finds a hidden room which was described in Vera’s diary as the chamber used by the prioress. There is access to the very spooky crypt beneath the house, through a hidden panel behind an old tapestry. Where is the ‘cell’ Vera talked about? Did her grandmother really keep children imprisoned in this cell?

The tension builds and builds as bit by bit Sam unravels the clues to the past found in the diaries.

This haunting tale is a must read. But not in the dark!

I loved the way the tension built and those revelations at the end! I was glued to the pages. Fabulous well developed characters which jumped off the page.

Just brilliant!

This book follows Sam Cooper, a 26 year old woman from Brooklyn. Her mother Vera has recently died of cancer. Whilst clearing away her mother’s possessions Sam uncovers a tin box containing correspondence between her mother and an English lawyer’s firm. From the contents of the letters, Sam discovers that her grandmother is a Lady and lives in Begars Abbey, a former nunnery, in England.

This comes as a shock to Sam, as she didn’t know she had any living relations in her mother’s native country. Vera never spoke of her parents and her childhood.

Curious, Sam writes a telegram to the lawyer, Mr Roger Bell, saying she was Vera’s daughter and it was her mother’s dying wish for Sam to meet her grandmother. It is of course a fabrication, but the lawyer believes Sam and reluctantly agrees. He books her a passage to England and tells Sam he will pick her up and take her to Begars Abbey.

When Sam arrives in England, there is no sign of Roger. She manages to get through to the lawyer’s firm, where Roger’s brother, Alec Bell, answers the phone. He is abrupt but says he will assist her.

Upon arriving at Begars Abbey, things are not what they seem right from the start. Sam sees a figure of a woman standing on the porch holding a lantern. However, she seems to be only person to see this woman. Is she a ghost?

Inside the house, Sam meets Mrs Pritchett, an eccentric housekeeper, who can’t stand Alec (and the feeling is mutual!). Sam also meets her grandmother, Lady Cooper, who is wheelchair bound and appears agitated most of the time. The house is also occupied by Nesta and Ivy, the former is Lady Cooper’s night nurse, and the latter, a maid.

Sam is given her mother’s old bedroom, where she discovers Vera’s old diaries. As she reads them, she discovers directions to a hidden crypt inside the Abbey. When Sam gets there, she discovers six skeletal remains. Who were those people buried there?

It soon appears that the family secrets are buried deep… Literally!

This is such a chilling tale, I am glad I read it during the day, as I don’t think I would have coped in the evenings – the descriptions were so vivid and I felt as if I was in the crypt with Sam.

I was shocked and disgusted to discover the family secret, but even more shocked to read that ending! It just came out of the blue, totally unexpected.

This book will send shivers down your spine. As I was reading it, I was comparing Mrs Pritchett to wicked Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Both were devoted to their mistresses and would do anything for them.

I definitely recommend this book.

Thank you to Viper Books for approving my NetGalley request and also for sending me a proof copy of this wonderful, spooky tale.

This is a powerful and haunting story.
The writing is so tense and deliciously dark, as we get drawn into the secrets and lies of Sam’s family, who for years have lived in the house.
I loved the descriptions of the house, the surroundings and all the little bidet holes. The creepy nature of the corridors adds to the sinister feel and I could totally empathise with Sam as she tried to work out what was real and what was in her imagination.
Building to a wonderful climax, this story is magnificent.

This is an excellent gothic novel but you have to be patient as it's very slow burning and I nearly stopped reading as it was even a bit boring.
Then Sam arrivers in Yorkshire and the pace quickens, things happend, the atmosphere gets darker.
And the book becomes a page turner that I couldn't put down.
But it takes time before you can appreciate the storytelling and the creepy atmosphere.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

What a fantastic book this is! I absolutely loved reading Begars Abbey, but I must caveat this review by saying that I am a massive fan of V.L. Valentine's writing, having loved The Plague Letters last year. So the chances that I was going to love this were high! This book has a different feel to it to The Plague Letters, starting in 1950s America before arriving in Northern England. Valentine's writing in Begars Abbey is so wonderfully descriptive and evocative that I could vividly imagine the tenement block in the US as clearly as I could imagine the ancient abbey in the UK. There are parts of this book that are genuinely terrifying and at several points I was concerned that the people I was reading about were not actually alive!! The sections which take place in the old crypt chilled me to the core and I gasped aloud at one particular point (not true, I gasped aloud on several occasions). I really liked the main character, Sam, and I have so much respect for Valentine's ability to write strong, likeable, formidable and fearless female characters.

Begars Abbey has cemented my love for Valentine's writing and I am so excited to see what she writes next. Thank you so much Viper books for my early digital copy.

Set in the 1950s this novel begins with young American Sam dealing with the sudden death of her mother Vera. Clearing their apartment she finds letters from an English solicitor updating Vera on the grandmother Sam knew nothing about. This begins a transatlantic journey for Sam to the family seat Begars Abbey in Yorkshire. Hoping to find out what led her mother to desert her family home Sam begins an investigation of the house and the old abbey environs, buoyed on by her finding Vera’s youthful diaries.
Much like Sarah Waters ‘The Little Stranger’ this is a gothic story with ghostly additives. The housekeeper and servants are giving nothing away and only Ivy, the youngest maid, seems to show any friendliness to Sam. The grandmother is unable to assist her as she suffered a stroke years before so Sam is left to investigate alone.
The house is and hides secret doors, underground passages and ancient crypts, all giving atmosphere to the story and adding to Sam’s fears that all is not well at Begars Abbey.
Using Vera’s diaries to look back to the 1920s allows the reader to see her perspective and make Sams mother part of her story and though a familiar plot device, it works really well at allowing the story to unfold organically. There are enough hints at what may be going on but I didn’t figure out what the exact denouement was at all which was a huge bonus for me. I loved Sams character, she’s feisty and not about to let anyone stop her from getting to the truth. The author keeps a good pace and the story is revealed slowly and has a nice little teasing twist at the end. I really loved it and am going to her previous novel now.

A hidden stash of telegrams and old letters sets Sam Cooper off on a transatlantic journey to see the crumbling family home and meet the infirm grandmother her mother never even mentioned while she was alive, only for her to discover that much darker family skeletons have also been kept hidden away.

I almost immediately warmed to the novel’s protagonist, Sam Cooper. She’s a lost soul, struggling to survive, and yet, she remains open and kind, as well as brave and resolute. When we meet her in early December 1953, she’s still living in the walk-up apartment in Brooklyn where she lived with her mother but things are not going so well for her since her mother’s death earlier that year. Desperate and nearly destitute, she rifles through their meagre furnishings and possessions in the hope of finding some spare change or something she can convert into cash.

What she finds instead is a bundle of telegrams and old letters between her mother, Vera, and an English law firm, with reference to a grandmother Sam never heard her mother mention. This discovery will take her on a journey from New York to a decrepit manor house just outside its older namesake city of York in the northeast of England. (I appreciated Vera’s decision to swap old York for New York when deciding where to escape to and found it very fitting and almost poetic.) Sam’s woefully ill-prepared for the sea crossing, and in particular for the company on board ship, let alone the lacklustre reception she receives upon arrival but she doesn’t shy away from her main purpose and never contemplates giving up on it and running home, even when others suggest she do just that.

Begars Abbey is suitably gothic and V L Valentine makes good use of its unusual features and legacy elements. It’s a rambling old manor house which has seen better days and was converted from its former use as a priory before being added to by subsequent owners and upgraded to an Abbey. There are windows of disparate shapes and sizes, heavy oak doors hidden behind tapestries, dark corners where shadows seem to lurk or shift shape, damp bedrooms, and draughty hallways along which strange noises travel during the night. Sam arrives there during a snowstorm and, with the wind howling about the house, it almost seems to be wailing in pain or warning her off it as no place to linger.

As Sam delves into the Abbey’s secrets and her mother’s life there, she unearths a puzzling maze of tantalising leads and frustrating dead ends with little in the way of help or comfort from the few housemates she has, perhaps with the exception of Alec. But even he is evasive and unwilling to answer too many questions about the past. He’s solicitous enough for her well-being in his older brother’s absence but almost obstructive when it comes to Begars Abbey. His older brother, Roger Bell, the lawyer she was corresponding with and the man who was meant to meet her, has disappeared. Which leaves only the housekeeper, Mrs Pritchett—and if Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca taught us anything, it’s to be wary of the housekeeper—her invalid grandmother, Lady Cooper, who is of scant use to her, her grandmother’s nurse, Nesta, and Ivy, the maid. These last three are all fascinating character studies.

It’s a small cast of characters but one which V L Valentine makes excellent use of to keep her story moving forward, providing Sam and the reader with sufficient interactions and titbits to keep us intrigued and make Sam determined to get to the bottom of the family secrets. Not only does she need to understand why Vera chose to run so far away but also why she kept her family background so completely hidden from Sam, when it was Sam’s family, as well.

Happily, Sam is pretty resourceful and has a good track record of discovering her mother’s hiding places, something which serves her well during her stay at Begars Abbey. It’s also good that she’s not someone who is easily discouraged or frightened. There are secrets within secrets here and, while some are less surprising than others, things get pretty dark and twisted here. (I also liked that V L Valentine kept some surprises back and these delivered a real punch when they were revealed.) The skeletons might not be in the closet at Begars Abbey—they’re covered in cobwebs and slightly harder to find than that—but once Sam makes her grim discovery, she’ll also quickly learn the shocking truth behind them.

Begars Abbey is a deliciously unsavoury slice of gothic set in a dark and rambling hall of long-buried secrets: it’s a toxic family story of money and influence, desire, jealousy and power, filled with the ghosts of its past. Begars Abbey lets slip its secrets through old letters and diaries, in whispers of silk and the brief shimmer of sequins, the tuning notes of a violin, the strangled cries of an old woman and carries them along on the draughts throughout this old, neglected house. Pick it up and let Begars Abbey whisper them to you. I can only recommend it to you.

Thanks to @ViperBooks for my early copy of the gorgeous hardback. This is a creepy, gothic thriller by @valentinevikki which is really well written and builds the feeling of unease from the beginning. Great characters with a sinister story that gradually unfolds over the course of a few days in a sinister old abbey setting. I couldn’t put it down until I knew the ending and I highly recommend it!

Begars Abbey once inhabited by nuns is now a ruin inhabited by ghosts. Sam Cooper has come from Brooklyn for her inheritance. To find her Grandmother a family she knows nothing about till she finds the diaries. A dark gothic story that will have you chilled. A mystery waiting to be solved starts slow but builds to a dark ending.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher Serpent’s Tail/Viper/Profile Books for my arc in exchange for an honest review.

A run down former convent full of dark secrets, you say? I really didn't need much more information to know that I really wanted to read Begars Abbey. Especially as I had enjoyed V.L. Valentine's previous novel, The Plague Letters.

Just like that one, Begars Abbey took a while to take off and grab me. The year is 1954. The place is Brooklyn, New York. The reader is introduced to Sam Cooper who is desperately in need of some kind of miracle. Her mother has died, she has no job, no prospects, no money to pay the rent. But then she discovers a stack of letters among her mother's possessions. Letters that reveal a family Sam's mother never spoke of in far away Yorkshire, England. Is it possible Sam isn't alone? And could there possibly be an inheritance?

Sam heads to Yorkshire and Begars Abbey, which turns out to be crumbling pile of bricks. The only family member who remains is a crippled grandmother, Lady Cooper, who cannot speak due to a series of strokes. There is a housekeeper who should possibly have retired many years ago, a few maids and creepy shadows in the corridors who might be the former nuns who never left. 😱

But why did Sam's mother keep all of this a secret from her? Why did her mother let them both live in poverty in Brooklyn when the family was clearly once incredibly wealthy?

Like I said, it took a hot minute for Begars Abbey to hook me. To the point where I nearly considered maybe not continuing. But once Sam arrived in Yorkshire and things started to pick up, I was immensely glad I kept going. So, if like me, you're struggling a little at the start, stick with it. It's worth it!

Strange things start happening the moment Sam arrives when the person who is supposed to meet her at the train station doesn't show up. From there, things slowly but surely get even weirder and creepier as the story goes on. Just like Sam, you have no idea who to trust. If anyone. There are secrets, dangers and odd noises lurking around every dark corner of this former abbey. Throughout the story, Sam desperately tries to find out why her mother left her home at a young age, never to return again. I wasn't at all prepared for the answers to that question. The revelations were quite a lot darker than I had anticipated, and also rather heartbreaking.

Begars Abbey is a delightfully chilling and atmospheric gothic ghost story. Intriguing and full of suspense, it had moments I didn't see coming which ensured I ended up having a fantastic time with this mystery. Despite the little wobble at the beginning, I absolutely enjoyed this and I very much look forward to what V.L. Valentine comes up with next.

I was offered this book as an ARC via NetGalley. It is an enthralling gothic tale which keeps you engaged till the end. To say much more would only spoil the suspense, it's a good page-turner ideal as a holiday read.