Book of the Day

From the review

Sonia Wilson spends her first weeks at Dr. Halder's manor doing exactly the job she was hired for: pinning specimens, rendering wing veins in ink, cataloguing beetles nobody else has bothered to name. Kingfisher lets that routine run long enough that the reader starts trusting it, the way Sonia does. Then a jar in the workroom holds something that shouldn't move, and doesn't stop. The setup is a familiar one for gothic horror: a woman with no money and no options takes a post in an isolated house, a difficult man with secrets, a housekeeper who knows more than she says. Kingfisher knows exactly how worn that furniture is and refuses to redecorate it, because the point here isn't the shape of the plot, it's what she does inside that shape. The entomology is the engine. Every strange behavior Sonia notices in the local wildlife, every whispered rumor about blood thieves in the woods, gets built out of real insect biology pushed one ugly step past where it should stop. That grounding is what makes the escalation land. This isn't vague supernatural dread; it's parasites with a plan, rendered specifically enough that the horror stays legible even as it gets worse.