Revenge narratives are a strange genre. The crimes that inspire retribution are usually horrible — so horrible that we often find ourselves uncomfortably rooting for a “justice” as ugly as the original offense.
Kate Mosse plays with this unsettling truth in her novel "The Taxidermist's Daughter." As Connie Gifford, the taxidermist's daughter of the title, tries to puzzle out the mysteries of her childhood, another woman she doesn't realize she's connected to is bent on retaliation for a rape committed 10 years earlier.
Mosse, best known for her 2005 bestseller "Labyrinth," draws an evocative setting — a small British village in 1912 — and creates a memorable character in Connie, a patient and intelligent woman caring for her alcoholic father. When the book opens, Connie is running her father's business, despite being initially repulsed by the work. In an early scene, we see her preserving a dead jackdaw, clutching a scalpel that "looked like a stiletto," a tool that in other households would be used for paring fruit, "not flesh." "Blood, skin, bone," Connie thinks, as she breathes in the scent of rotting animal, a smell that used to nauseate her.
Connie suffered an accident as a child that erased her earlier memories. Yet as ominous events begin happening in her seaside town, scenes from her past begin to seep through: Who was that vaguely familiar woman she saw watching the house a few weeks before? Why won’t her father tell Connie about her childhood? And why has he disappeared after another woman is found murdered in the river near their home?
The answers to these questions are revealed in pieces, through numerous short scenes that switch point of view among various characters, most notably Harry Woolston, a young man whose father has also disappeared. Together, Harry and Connie attempt to sort out what has happened. It’s not long before we begin to understand the details of the crime committed years ago, and to connect the woman wronged with the loving voice of Cassie, whom Connie remembers reciting poems and songs that come back to her in snippets. In the meantime, we switch to the point of view of the men who were involved in the long-ago rape, as they are summoned one by one to an isolated cottage.
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Mosse traverses this complicated terrain adeptly. At times, though, she makes it too easy. Characters sometimes make mistakes that seem implausible; for instance, Connie doesn’t check the location where readers know her father has been locked away. Other characters who seem to have sharp judgment end up trusting people they obviously shouldn’t.
Yet mostly, Mosse, co-founder of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), succeeds in striking a delicate balance as she explores a wronged woman’s justifiable anger and her unjustifiable revenge. The vengeful Cassie, who worked for Connie’s father, might also be called a taxidermist’s daughter. Is she, too, the novel’s heroine? The answer for Mosse is clearly no, but in asking us to consider the possibility, she poses larger, more complicated questions about when a woman’s revenge is acceptable.
Burnsis the author of “The Missing Woman and Other Stories.”
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tHE tAXIDERMIST’S DAUGHTER
By Kate Mosse
Morrow. 412 pp. $26.99
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