Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas

Pages: 320 

Publisher: Apollo 

Released: 8th of June 2023 

A grand hotel, a famous opera star and a psychoanalyst with a hidden agenda. Kate Mascarenhas's third novel offers her readers a glamorous, thrilling ride through murder, madness and the darkest recesses of the mind.

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, spying on their surroundings in the gilt mirrors and perfectly polished tableware, 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 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 and Nora will find herself face to face with a past she thought she had long left behind...

What I Have to Say 

So this novel started out with the glitz and glamour of the nineteen thirties, it set up the premise of a fun historical thriller and then turned into a fantasy novel? It leaves a lot of mystery as to whether the fantasy stuff is in the main character's head for a while, but it was definitely more fantasy than thriller. I like fantasy novels, I review a lot of them, but having such a bait and switch be pulled on me was more than a bit disconcerting. 

The ending was also too easy. It set up big stakes and then just fixed it with barely any effort taken. It was a real let down, but I was glad I wasn't really into the book because it would have fallen really flat for me. 

And honestly it was all a bit weird. The fantasy stuff was only the start. It unsettled me and put me off reading a lot. I liked the sapphic relationship, but everything else was just really odd. This is certainly not a book I would read again. 

3 stars 

My thanks go to Netgalley and Apollo for providing me with this copy for review.