I hesitated before I picked up this book, because I thought that it might be just another example of a kind if book that I have read many times before. I did pick it up, and I was glad that I did as soon as I read the author’s introduction.

‘On the small Carribean island where I grew up, I re-read ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’, trying to imagine windswept moors, drawing rooms draped in silk and sighing women, and men dashing about on horses – corrupting or taming or rescuing.

My own word stretched to coconut trees and white sand. Nothing from it ever made an appearance in those pages. At some point their came a realisation that those books I loved didn’t quite love me back. And that left questions in their wake.

Why couldn’t a Jamaican former slave be the star of her own gothic romance? Why couldn’t she be complicated, ambiguous, complex? Why had no one like that ever had a love story like those?’

Frannie Langton, the star of this gothic romance, is a wonderful answer to those questions.

She was born a slave early in the 19th century, beginning her life as the only mulatto on a Sugar plantation worked by slaves belonging to the Langton family from England. The Master and Mistress brought her into the house, she was educated, but that left her isolated because she would never fit into their world and she couldn’t fit back into the world of her fellow slaves.

When circumstances forced the Master to return to England he took Frannie with him. She hope for freedom, for a new life; but he gave her to friends, to becomes a servant in their grand house. She catches the eye of her new Mistress, she keeps Frannie close to her, and a bond grows between them ….

The story moves forward to tell the story of Frannie’s life in London and it looks backwards to tell the story of her childhood in Jamica.

Frannie has much time to think about her past, because one morning she awoke to find the Mistress she had come to loved lying dead and covered in blood. She was arrested, she was imprisoned, and she was put on trial. She knew that she hadn’t – that she couldn’t have – done what she was accused of, but she knew that the circumstances made her look guilty and that her background and her situation would be held against her, and she wanted to understand how her life had reached that point, because she had a great many questions about her own past that she could not answer.

Sara Collins writes so well. The cast of characters is wonderful, and each and every one of them has different aspects – nobody is there simply to play a part, they are all fully realised human beings who have pasts – and hopefully futures. That cast is deployed well in an engaging plot, and interesting questions are explored along the way.

The atmosphere is wonderful, allowing the characters and the story to live and breathe, and bringing the period and two very different characters to life.

The prose is gorgeous and Frannie’s voice rang true.

‘English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that is heavy, and always has the seep of water in it. The streets were wet, and seemed to be tumbling under some giant peggy-stick. I stood there among the dizzying clatter of hammers and scaffolds and barrows moving piles of bricks that were either crumbling our of buildings or being plastered into them, so it seemed to be a city building itself and eating itself at the same time. Waiting carriages lined up along the high wall, horses shying under the dark bulk of warehouses. A crossing-sweeper was knocked down and the line of foot passengers just curved around him, like a river around a rock.’

I loved the way that the author honoured her influences while telling her own story. That passage made me add Dickens to the list of names that were mentioned in the introduction. I was disappointed thought that there were elements in this story that were over-familiar from other recent books that were set in the same period, and that the set-up of the murder mystery was rather too elaborate and improbable.

That meant there were too many times when this book felt generic, and the writing and the ideas underpinning the story were so much better than that.

This is a promising debut but I think – I hope – that the author will go on to write better books.