The Last Daughter by Nicola Cornick
I’ve got a real treat of a book for you today. Are you a fan of dual timeline stories? They’re sometimes called time shift stories. You know, there’s two narrative strands in a novel, a contemporary story with a mystery and a historical story that explains what’s going on in the present.
Sometimes time travel is involved. Sometimes it’s a mystical link between the past and today. Sometimes it’s just a straightforward historical event that has repercussions in the contemporary world without any woo-woo playing a part at all.
One of the masters of this genre is Nicola Cornick, who has also written some fabulous historical romances too if that’s your taste, and I’m assuming because you’re on my page that it is. I’ve loved all Nicola’s time shift books. I talk about The Forgotten Sister in my April 2021 My Favorite Things column and 2017’s The Phantom Tree made my list of top reads for that year.
This year, she released The Last Daughter which revisits the enduring mystery of the fate of the Princes in the Tower at the end of the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century. This book was released in North America as The Last Daughter of York.
The contemporary strand tells the story of Serena Warren, who has been haunted all her life by the unexplained disappearance of her twin sister Caitlin 11 years ago in the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire. She reluctantly returns to the site of her childhood holidays when Caitlin’s bones are discovered inside an 18th century tomb that hasn’t been opened for 200 years. This makes no sense – or at least it doesn’t until Nicola has woven her authorial magic to explain this uncanny occurrence.
Minster Lovell harbors its own mystery – the fate of Richard III’s best friend and loyal supporter Francis Lovell who vanished seemingly into thin air after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The historical part of the story takes us back to the drama and tragedy of the Wars of the Roses and tells us of the marriage of Anne Fitzhugh and Francis Lovell and how the couple become inextricably entwined in the fate of the English crown.
As with all Nicola’s stories, the historical element is vividly imagined and impeccably researched. The political conflicts are clearly presented and the personalities leap off the page. The modern part of the story is intriguing, and Serena and the people she meets on her quest to discover her sister’s fate are fascinating and often sinister. Poor Serena. The more she finds out, the more baffling the mystery becomes and in the process of her investigations, she discovers that nothing about her life is as she’s always believed. High stakes stuff!
Not only that, there’s a lovely romance that offers Serena the chance not only of at last solving the mystery of her sister’s death but of a new beginning. The solution to all the questions is satisfying and ingenious and one of the best explanations for the long-standing issue of did Richard III kill his nephews in the Tower of London that I’ve ever found. I’d love it to be true!
If you like your historical fiction with a bit of a paranormal glow and a touch of romance, this is the book for you. I found it a real page turner and read it in one gulp on a Sunday. Now I’m looking forward to Nicola’s next release which is out this month (yay!). The Winter Garden deals with the Gunpowder Plot in the 17th century. Sounds like a great read!