A review by nonesensed
Bone China by Laura Purcell

5.0

Hester Why must make a good impression on her new employer. She must. She has nowhere else to turn. Hester Why isn't even her real name. She must hide away here, as far away from London as she can get, so that her previous employer never finds her. But has she found a place to escape to or has she walked straight into new danger? The servants of Morvoren House are over all a friendly lot, but the mistress of the house, Miss Pinecroft, acts beyond strange and the oldest servant is madly superstitious. What happened at Morvoren House to leave its sickly mistress with a room full of china she spends every waking hour, and most nights, watching over like a guard dog?

Laura Purcell has this great skill of balancing "maybe magical, maybe mundane" in a way that avoids infuriating the reader. Believe you me, I'm a huge fan of supernatural horror and thus have a low threshold for how much a story can toy with that before I grow tired of it. But Purcell grows the creepy and unsettling atmosphere of the story so well, making that the focus of the story more than the need for answers to why the horror is happening. I've yet to read a book by this author where the ending disappointed me; that is a rare thing in the horror genre, at least in my experience.

Highly recommended to all fans of creeping horror!