Thank you to St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, Jess Armstrong and Netgalley for granting me an advance copy of this book in return for my honest opinions.

Loved the historical setty for this mystery novel. Very unique, but perfect. I also like the bookstore setting. Ruby was such a great character.

Overall, the book was good, the characters, plot and setting were good! In my opinion the book was very well written.

I enjoy the story and would buy a copy for myself and a friend. That is what it is about!

Highly recommend.

Definitely an intriguing read! It took me a while to get into this one, but once I was a few chapters in, I couldn’t put it down. The mix of logical and magical was unique and made for a fun storyline. I enjoyed Ruby as a character- she reminded me of an alcohol loving Nancy Drew in the best way!
I will recommend this to friends for sure!

I enjoyed The Curse of Penryth Hall, set in post WWI in a mall Welsh Village. The gloomy manor home, the storms rumbling through, the suspicious villagers, and above all the Welsh legends and curses possibly coming to life all join together for an atmospheric mystery. Ruby’s story unfolds in bits of conversations and her memories, an heiress who pretends to be tough, but is nursing a broken heart. She tries to convince herself that the legends are just that, but there is a bit of doubt when she and the local witch get closer. She’s promised her old friend and lover to protect her son from what, or whoever has already committed at least one murder so she’s drawn into helping to solve it, putting herself at danger.
Thanks to NetGalley and Minotaur for an eARC, I’m hoping this is just the first story of many about Ruby, Ruan, Mr. Owens and Mrs. Penrose, what will happen next on their trip to Scotland?

The Curse of Penryth Hall was entertaining. A book delivery turns into a nightmare with intriguing twists and turns. Just when you think you the plot is clear the reader has to reset and take time to rethink. The concept of a “pellar” is intriguing and thought provoking sending me off to discover a whole new world. I can’t imagine that this is 5e end of the relationship between our two main characters. I want more!

Penryth Hall is an unsettling place, ancient and long rumored to be cursed. A place that Ruby Vaughn should know well enough to avoid. A place that she should avoid even when her elderly employer turned housemate sends her on a delivery to a village deep in the Cornish countryside, deep in the shadow of Penryth Hall. But, despite herself, Ruby cannot forget her affection for Tamsyn, her once love and formerly closest friend. Cannot bring herself to leave after being invited to visit, despite the history and the pain and a truly, horribly awkward dinner with Tamsyn’s husband, Edward Chenowyth. Late in the night Ruby is wakened from a dark and bloody dream by the bells of Penryth Hall ringing for the first time in thirty years. The curse has returned. Edward is dead, slaughtered in the orchard. If the villagers are right the next target will be Tamsyn, the curse will take her as it did Edward, and that is something Ruby cannot allow. Not even if it means working with the mysterious man the villagers call a Pellar and trusting that he might have the power to truly break this curse.

I find my opinions on Jess Armstrong's The Curse of Penryth Hall a bit all over the place. The writing is solid, but often feels oddly loose. Like the connective tissue has gone a bit slack. The mystery moves at a good clip, but also seems a bit directionless, as though the reader is meant to be following Ruby rather than trying to put clues together themself.

A big chunk of this comes with Ruby's interactions with Tamsyn, her friend and former lover, the woman who both abandoned her and called her back to Penryth Hall. There are all these moments of Ruby thinking to herself that she hardly recognizes the woman Tamsyn has become. Scenes where I could all but feel the Dutch angle as the tension built high and heavy, but not on a terribly solid base. Armstrong clearly wanted to have this tension between Ruby and Tamsyn, these two people who still love each other but who could not make it work, who perhaps never really knew each other. The tension lacks legs though. Ruby getting panicked because of ill-defined reasons feels as flat as Tamsyn invoking their shared past and how Ruby never understood her.

Likewise, there were a number of other plot points that just felt dropped. The mysterious woman seeking out Ruan Kivell, the town Pellar, he who has the people's trust. A bit with Ruby wondering out into a specific moor. The particularly dangerous book that was part of the delivery that brought Ruby to Lothel Green in the first place. They all feel like they were supposed to have more purpose in the story, but instead it feels like they were edited out. Maybe they will show up again in a future Ruby Vaughn story. The big reveal at the end also feels like it falls here, I can look back and kind of see it but it relies on a gothic horror trope that just does not work for me.

And this all feels like quite a shame because I rather enjoyed the characters, Ruby especially. There is something rather interesting about her blend of desperate disbelief in the supernatural and her rather more natural feeling embrace of science. She feels like she is afraid of what it means if she lets herself believe in the abnormal, in the implications of what it means if the baronet's death really is a curse rather than a nice reasonable murder. The push and pull of her feelings towards other characters is nice too. That whole trusting Ruan while also refusing to believe any of the Pellar stuff beyond that people believe in and listen to him. Her love and hurt and worry for Tamsyn. It is a lovely mash of contradictions. Ruby is clever and willing to trust and work with people to get the job done. She has this tragic backstory with social indisgressions and loss and work as a frontline ambulance driver during the war. It all leaves me wishing she had been given a bit more room to put things together earlier on.

I find myself really wishing I had enjoyed The Curse of Penryth Hall more. It was the sort of book that I mostly enjoyed in the course of reading it but then, between the last few chapters and thinking about it after finishing it, I found myself settling into a sort of funk of frustration with the whole thing. Armstrong is a solid enough writer, and I will likely read her again in the future. But The Curse of Penryth Hall gets a two out of five from me, lots of potential and some really interesting moments but overall, there were just too many points that just did not quite work out.

If you like ghosts, curses and Pellars. Then The Curse of Penryth Hall by Jess Armstrong is the book for you. Set in the the time of Sirs, heirs blood and curses this book held many different feelings for me.
Ruby Vaughan was sent away to live away from her family because of her wild ways. Lets say Ruby would be a suitable wife with the way she is behaving. Off to find her way to Mr. Owens a lovely old man with books upon books of many different subjects. One day he had asked Ruby to deliver some books to a friend of his, a so called healer. The problem was this task would bring her to the Cornish countryside which does not hold great fondness for Ruby. While she is doing this errand for Mr. Owens Ruby thinks of her friend Tamsyn who is married to Sir Edward Chenowyth and who resided in Penryth Hall a place that holds not great memories for Ruby.

Once Ruby delivers these books to Ruan Kivell she decides to visit her friend to possibly sort out what caused the rift in their friendship. This little visit turns into a time of uncertainty for Ruby and brings her into the fold of the Penryth Hall Curse and who this Ruan Kivell really is. Ruby doesn't really believe in curses but she does see the change in her old friend and the bloodshed and hurt that follows Ruby while she is in Cornwall.

What and who are behind the murder of Sir Edward Chenowyth, the attacks of villagers within Cornwall. What does Ruby and Mr. Kivell have to do with it all. What journey will they go on to find out if there really is a killer or is the curse true? Everyone in town thinks the curse is for real because many of Sir Edwards family have met the same death as he did. So what of his wife and their son fate? Will Ruby and Mr. Kivell survive trying to find out the truth.

I do love a good mystery. My problem with this story was that I myself got confused with the characters. There were times when to much was happening and I was confused and had to refer back in the story. I did find the characters very interesting. The friendship between Ruby and Tamsyn even though they had the rift between I liked that Ruby wanted to find out what really happened to Tamsyn after she married Sir Edward. Plus I really liked the character of Ruan Kivell. He was mysterious and i wanted to know more about him.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC and Ms. Armstrong for a very interesting story. I would recommend this to anyone who loves the tales of ghosts, curses and murder.

I loved reading this book.

The Cornish location set the mood for this moody, mystical, gothic, cozy mystery.
It grabbed me at the beginning and I wanted to know more about Ruby, her friend Tamryn and Ryan Kivell.
The return of the curse, real or imagined, made the story compelling and fascinating. I wanted to definitely keep reading to find out the mystery and I was satisfied with the ending as it was plausible and interesting.
Ruby is a strong, independent heroine and her journey through this mystery was well written and engaging. I don't want to just use postive adjectives to describe this book.
The best I can summarize is that I am looking forward to another story with these characters!

I really enjoyed this book and the twist at the end . I couldn’t put it down and it kept me guessing until the very end although I had hoped for more from the two main characters I really enjoyed it . Look forward to the next book

That was amazing! One of the best murder mystery occult ghost stories I've ever read! And kept me wondering, right up to the end. Which leads me to hope there will be more Ruby stories in the future and hopefully with her Pellar.

Huge thanks to the publisher and NetGallery for the advance copy in return for an honest review.

The Curse of Penryth Hall was the winner of Minotaur Books and the Mystery Writers of America annual “First Crime Novel Competition”. I try to read the winners of this competition and often find them to be well written and enjoyable. This book was no exception. I enjoyed the setting of Cornwall and the time period just after WWI. Cornwall, well known as a place of legends, mythical creatures and ancient curses was a good choice to set a gothic mystery. I am giving the book 3 stars because I found the storyline rather confusing. I almost feel there were too many story threads going on and I would have enjoyed it more with tighter editing.

While I enjoyed this book as a whole - reading it proved to be confusing at times. A lot of the storyline was told as if we were supposed to already know Ruby's backstory. It was confusing to read that she was from America, being told in conversation, and that Ruby had been to London. Later learning it was for the war. Also, the over-use of "lover" and "maid" was so grating to me. Initially I thought, since it had been mentioned in the beginning of the book that Ruby had a liking to drinking and partying, that her and Mrs. Penrose had some sort of drunken fling that Ruby just couldn't remember. But then she's called lover by another and I just sat there like ????

The characters felt flat to me, and I found myself reading this on essentially autopilot. Overall it felt fairly under-developed.

While I enjoyed this book as a whole - reading it proved to be confusing at times. A lot of the storyline was told as if we were supposed to already know Ruby's backstory. It was confusing to read that she was from America, being told in conversation, and that Ruby had been to London. Later learning it was for the war. Also, the over-use of "lover" and "maid" was so grating to me. Initially I thought, since it had been mentioned in the beginning of the book that Ruby had a liking to drinking and partying, that her and Mrs. Penrose had some sort of drunken fling that Ruby just couldn't remember. But then she's called lover by another and I just sat there like ????

The characters felt flat to me, and I found myself reading this on essentially autopilot. Overall it felt fairly under-developed.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for a copy of this eARC!

3.5 I really hope this is a series starter because the characters will get better over time if given the chance. I hit some rough patches and wondered if I would finish it but I powered through and am glad I did. At times I felt like some of plot points were run on sentences that kept running right off the page, such as Ruby's past, her "real" job, etc. Overall, a good historical weekend read mystery.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
Expected publication date: December 5, 2023
Ruby Vaughan is an heiress who, to avoid the secrets from her past, helps run a bookstore with her octogenarian landlord, miles away from her hometown in Exeter. But, as pasts are known to do, Ruby’s catches up to her when she returns to Exeter on a book delivery and runs into her former best friend, Tamsyn, who is now married to a baron and whom Ruby hasn’t spoken to since leaving the war. Obligated to check on her friend, Ruby returns to Penryth Hall and quickly learns that her friends’ happy life is a lie. When Tamsyn’s husband is found brutally murdered, people in town begin to speculate that the “Curse of Penryth Hall” has struck again, seeing as the murder follows a pattern from many years before. But Ruby doesn’t believe in curses and she is convinced to stick around and find out the truth- even if that makes her the next target.
“The Curse of Penyth Hall” is the debut novel by author Jess Armstrong. I was surprised to discover this was a debut, mostly because the story itself felt like a sequel. Narrated by Ruby, she talks of her previous relationship with Tamsyn and the complications that arose (which this novel does not go into), as well as her life as an heiress that ended when her father exiled her (again, something she occasionally mentions and we know nothing about). Ruby talks briefly of the war and her time there, but that, too, seems to provide just enough information to satisfy the most basic of character development. Armstrong makes it clear from the onset that the story is about “Penryth Hall” (and it is) but there was so much more to Ruby that I felt like I was missing something.
When the bodies start to pile up, there’s talk of magic, witchcraft and mysterious curses which plague the old Penryth Estate, and that is where my interest was piqued. A paranormal murder-mystery? Why, don’t mind if I do! When the baron is murdered, there are many suspects, but as the pool narrows, Armstrong still manages to keep the reader guessing. The ending, and suspect reveal, is slightly complicated with its intrinsic character connections, but it definitely serves to satisfy!
Armstrong has definitely crafted an inimitable, creative story, with relatable characters and the right number of suspenseful twists and turns! There are hints of a sequel in the ending, so I am excited to see if there is more Ruby Vaughan to come!

Thank you Netgalley, author, and the publishers for allowing me the opportunity to read this e-arc.

I usually don't care for gothic stories but this one, apparently the beginning of a series, was intriguing. Ruby Vaughn is well-drawn and her interactions with an old friend, her octogenarian boss, and Ruan were instrumental in her quest for a curse. Not sure I will read more.

The story follows Ruby Vaughn, a spunky heroine, as she finds herself in the middle of a grisly "curse" involving her ex best friend Tamysn. Tamysn's husband is brutally murdered and with the help of the town's Pellar, Ruan Kivell, Ruby and him must solve it before it takes another victim.

Ruby is a very headstrong and speaks her mind kind of character. I actually really liked her for the most part, though I could find some of her dialogue extremely tiresome. Especially when it was focused on Tamysn as she just repeated the same thing over and over again. How much she missed her, how Tamysn didn't choose her, blah blah blah. Literally repeated so many times. My dislike of that character was probably more due to how annoying Ruby was with her. I did really like Ruan Kivell. His interactions with Ruby were probably my favorite parts. I found myself more interested in their dynamic and why they were connected than I was in the actual story. I really liked most of the characters overall, Mr. Owens also being a favorite. The only other issue I had with the characters were Mrs. Penrose and Alice Martin. I understand the two are supposed to be close friends, but they literally talk exactly the same. Even with it being a a certain time period they both over used "Lover" and "Maid" far too much. It could be easy to get the two confused.

There was a random interaction with a lady that had a warning for Kivell that literally made no sense and just felt like a random suspense input. Unless that was the author's way of hinting at a sequel, though the epilogue does that as well. The build up behind the mystery of the curse was done well. However the big reveal felt super rushed and flat for me. The mystery of the curse felt pretty easy to figure out. I wish the obvious clues the author gives to the readers was done more subtly vs basically highlighting it for us. It made it a lot easier for myself to figure out early on about the big reveal which is why I was probably disappointed by it. It just felt lackluster for me. I wish more had happened during the big reveal, instead it was done so quickly I was sure there had to be more to it. I was waiting for some sort of twist, but there wasn't.

This novel was an easy 4 stars for me up until the big reveal. It was a good mystery read with great characters. If there's a sequel I definitely will be reading based on how much I enjoyed Ruby, Kivell and Mr. Owens. I hope that the story arc will be better if there is another.

Thank you to NetGalley, for access to this book.

The Curse of Penryth Hall is an engaging gothic mystery that follows Ruby Vaughn to a small Cornish village where death greets her on her first night.
It took me a while to connect with Jess Armstrong's writing style and I can't quite pinpoint why. But once I did, I was enthralled with Ruby Vaughn and her quest to determine what's behind the curse - something real or something supernatural.
I loved watching as Ruby and her relationship with Tamsyn, her former-best friend, evolves. And her banter with village healer Ruan Kivell is funny and filled with the perfect amount of early 20th Century sexual tension.
I enjoyed trying to solve the mystery of who or what killed Tamsyn's husband, kicking myself when I fell for a red herring.
I felt the story was a little incomplete with a cryptid premonition from a character that I think is supposed to leave space for future books involving Ruby Vaughn. If that's the case, I can't wait to read them.

What an interesting read! I'm a fan of mystery but hadn't read any in the gothic style in a while. This was a brilliant example of both and captured my attention well. Within just a few pages, I could tell why this debut has already won awards. The characters are delightful, the mystery full of intrigue and twists, and the end satisfying. Read for yourself and enjoy!

I really enjoyed this book. Ruby Vaughn is an eccentric young woman who lives with the elderly Mr Owen working in his bookshop. She makes a book delivery to the Cornish countryside where she has vowed never to return after a tough separation from her closed friend who lives there with her infant son and adulterous husband. She makes the decision to visit the friend at her home, Penryth Hall, and finds herself at the centre of a mysterious curse she does not believe in. She makes connections with many people in this small village in the countryside while trying to solve the mysteries that are occurring. This was an engaging story with likeable characters and the ending took me for surprise and seems to be set up for a sequel. Thank you to Minotaur Books and Jess Armstrong for the chance to read this ARC.