by Kate Mosse

‘In her last seconds of consciousness, [she] grieved to think this was how the story would end. In a forgotten corner of a graveyard on the other side of the world. This is the day of my death.‘

Readers who have followed Kate Mosse’s story of the Joubert Family and the Huguenot-Catholic Wars may dimly remember those three sentences. They were part of the Prologue of the first book in the series, The Burning Chamber.

The year is 1682. Isabelle Joubert Lepard has grown up in London but she is a distant descendant of Minou, the protagonist of the first novel. She possesses all of Minou’s journals as well as diaries and notebooks written by two other Jouberts – Louise and Suzanne, and it is her ambition to complete a book on the courageous women of her family.

Her story isn’t complete, so Isabelle travels to Cape Colony in South Africa, hoping to pick up the trail. Little does she know that she is sailing into adventure and danger.

We will come to that later! However The Map of Bones, the fourth and final volume of the series begins in 1688 with Suzanne. A French Huguenot refugee from Europe, she is travelling on the China, a Dutch ship, to Cape Town, seeking information about her distant cousin Louise, intrepid commander of the ‘pirate ship’ Old Moon, who vanished without trace from the colony sixty years earlier. With Suzanne on the voyage is her grandmother, Florence and a group of orphans, including the eldest, Judith, intended brides for Boer farmers. Suzanne befriends Judith. She is taken on as an interpreter by the authorities.

Judith witnesses a murder and puts herself in danger from the killer who tries to silence her but fails. Suzanne reports the incident to Adriaan van Dijk, an officer in the military garrison, who falls in love with Judith.

‘Lars lashed out again. This time he hit his mark. For a moment, the seafarer stood with a look of bewilderment on his face. Then his hands went to a jagged wound in his throat.’

With Adriaan’s help, Suzanne sets out into the veldt and wine country hoping to find someone who knew Louise. It’s an adventure that brings both danger and quite unexpected and astonishing reward.

And similar dangers and surprises await Isabelle Leopard some one hundred and eighty years later.

‘Isabelle felt her nerves were stretched tighter than ever. She had imagined this moment for so long – holding in her hand the record of what happened to Louise and Gilles. But she also feared to read it. Having seen their names on the gravestone, everything felt so final.’

Kate Mosse has given us yet another pacy adventure story in the mould of Sepulchre and Labyrinth. As in those novels, she has invested in two fearless female protagonists. I was sorry when I got to the end; I could have stayed in their company for longer!

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