An old house can hold many secrets. Hollowpark in the west of Ireland certainly does. At the heart of the gardens is an intricate maze, named after a deadly poison, Belladonna.

If you know the way through, it’s magical, a hiding place and playground like no other. If you don’t, it’s a place of fear and sinister riddles, where a young girl once went missing and was never seen again.

Grace comes to Hollowpark as a nanny for young Skye FitzMahon. Soon the mysterious past of Hollowpark has seduced her.

Who is the woman she sometimes glimpses in an upstairs window? Or the apparition who keeps showing up unexpectedly, pleading, ‘Find me’. And how can she fight her growing attraction to Skye’s father?

My Review

I absolutely loved reading this with my Pigeonhole book club. It’s so much more fun when you can comment throughout the book. And we certainly did that.

The book is set in three timelines. We have the early 1800s when we meet Deirdre and her family, who own Hollowpark Hall, with its deadly Belladonna Maze. A quick aside – our friends planted a maze during the year of the late Queen’s Jubilee at Symonds Yat. It is known as the Jubilee Maze, unsurprisingly. It opened officially on the day of the then Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding and we were there. Thankfully no Belladonna or ghosts (though you can never be sure about the latter).

Secondly, we have 2007, when nanny Grace meets the Fitzmahons while she is working at a holiday hotel in Greece. Patrick and Isla ask her to return to Ireland with them and be a permanent nanny to toddler Skye. She accepts and travels to Ireland where she will live at the Hall. It’s there that she meets Patrick’s mother Delia, a formidable woman who is fiercely protective of Hollowpark.

And finally we have 1973 when a teenager goes missing on Halloween night.

It’s all very spooky and scary with its feel of a Gothic mystery and more secrets than you can shake a stick at. But is Grace the only one who sees the ghost of a teenager, pleading with her to ‘find me’? Or the woman in the window, dressed like someone from 200 years ago?

I couldn’t wait to read on – my only criticism being that it goes a bit bonkers towards the end, but that’s never put me off a book. Anyone who reads my reviews will know that I love a bit of nuttiness and eccentricity.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read. 

About the Author

Sinéad Crowley is a writer and broadcaster, whose three DS Claire Boyle crime novels were all nominated for the ‘Best Crime’ category at the Irish Book Awards, with the first two becoming Irish Times bestsellers. She is currently Arts and Media Correspondent with RTE News, the Irish national broadcaster. The Belladonna Maze moves away from crime, and is published by Head of Zeus in 2022.