Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas

 

Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas.

Published 8th June 2023 by Head of Zeus.

From the cover of the book:

A grand hotel, a famous opera star and a psychoanalyst with a hidden agenda. 

February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, while the hotel's red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.

In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn't see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she's determined not to let her out of her sight.

But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur...

Kate Mascarenhas' third novel offers her readers a glamorous, thrilling ride through murder, madness and the darkest recesses of the mind.

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Birmingham, 1929. Welcome to the luxurious Regent Hotel, where guests can dine on sumptuous cuisine, sip absinthe in the glamorous cocktail bar, and have their every need catered to by an army of discrete and smartly dressed attendants. While the facade of the uber-stylish Regent may seem highly respectable, this is a place of contradictions, much like its clientele. For some, rules can be bent to accommodate more lascivious tastes, and misdemeanours can be overlooked, if the guests are wealthy enough - or know how to trade in secrets.

As a winter storm closes in, psychoanalyst Dr Nora Dickinson checks in. Her secret mission is to spy on Berenice Oxbow, the famous opera singer from Zurich, on behalf of her psychiatrist husband, but Nora's motives are clouded. When the hotel gets cut off from the outside world in a mighty blizzard, the evil that stalks the corridors of the Regent comes out to play, and Nora might just be the only one that can stem the tide of murder and mayhem that threatens to disrupt her plans.

Hokey Pokey is the third glorious novel from Kate Mascarenhas, and it offers an intriguing extension of the themes she has explored in her earlier books, The Psychology of Time Travel and The Thief on the Winged Horse. 

In many ways this is a classic locked room mystery, which Nora finds herself bound to solve when murder raises its ugly head, but this is not your normal golden age crime story. The setting of the Regent Hotel may be straight out of the 1920s, with deliciously described sights sounds and smells that conjure up the delights of the era for your sensuous pleasure, right down to the absinthe laden cocktails available in the bar - but here there be monsters. 

Drawing on fable and folklore, Mascarenhas blurs the lines between reality and imagination, moving between events at the Regent, Nora's childhood in the woods of Alspeth, and her life in Zurich. She brings alive visions from your nightmares in true horror fashion, but she incorporates psychoanalytical aspects of the motivations and experiences of the characters too, so you can never be quite sure how much of the story is intended to be taken literally, or metaphsyically - until the truth becomes shockingly clear.

There is a veritable feast of themes running throughout this novel, and Mascarenhas weaves them through compelling scenes thrumming with taut emotion, passion, suspicion, and violence. Identity, control, power and desire are deftly explored; notions of illusion and mimicry are used to perfection; and there are recurring motifs that beautifully link all the parts of the story together. Nora's evolution across the novel, as she comes to understand herself, and what is going on around her, is spellbinding.

I am a big fan of Mascarenhas' writing, especially when it comes to her female characters. I have loved all her novels, and Hokey Pokey is my favourite one yet. I am already craving more.

Hokey Pokey is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Head of Zeus for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Kate Mascarenhas is a writer.

Born in 1980, she is of mixed heritage (white Irish father, brown British mother) and has family in Ireland and the Republic of Seychelles. She lives in Birmingham with her partner.

After studying English at Oxford and Applied Psychology at Derby, Kate completed a Literary Studies and Psychology PhD at Worcester.

She has written three novels: The Psychology of Time Travel, The Thief on the Winged Horse, and Hokey Pokey.