A Haunting at Venus Bay
Julie Brooks
2025 Cass Shaw has decided that it is time to leave London and her heartbreak of a broken relationship behind and move to Australia, her brother Liam and his family live in Melbourne and she has purchased a house sight unseen on the coast of Victoria, a place that she spent many a holiday in her teenage years, as an interior designer Cass has plans to make this old house into a beautiful beachside home, but when she arrives and spends her first night there Cass is already having second thoughts there are so many strange things happening, but Cass is determined to make this place her home.
1953 Minna Topp and her mother had arrived in Australia from Germany after the war and have been travelling the East Coast of Australia from one fairground to another, when Minna meets wood-chopper Albert Adams she is soon whisked away from her mother and the life she knows to become Albert’s wife on a dairy farm near Venus Bay, it is not long before Minna realises that Albert just wanted a worker for the farm not a true wife and her life is nothing like she expected it to be.
Cass meets the local police officer Josh and they are becoming friends and soon she learns that both Albert and Minna disappeared twenty years apart never to be found and with a strange mirror in the house that seems to have shadows following her and a kewpie doll that moves by itself Cass wants to know more and while clearing the house she finds an exercise book that seems to have Minna’s story in it and the story unfolds.
This is a fabulous duel time story, the characters are fabulous and the setting just right for the atmospheric story, MS. Brooks pulled me into the story from the start and I felt like I was on the coast with all of the characters, no fault of the author but the formatting was terrible, but I loved the story and I do highly recommend this one.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my copy to read and review.
1953 Minna Topp and her mother had arrived in Australia from Germany after the war and have been travelling the East Coast of Australia from one fairground to another, when Minna meets wood-chopper Albert Adams she is soon whisked away from her mother and the life she knows to become Albert’s wife on a dairy farm near Venus Bay, it is not long before Minna realises that Albert just wanted a worker for the farm not a true wife and her life is nothing like she expected it to be.
Cass meets the local police officer Josh and they are becoming friends and soon she learns that both Albert and Minna disappeared twenty years apart never to be found and with a strange mirror in the house that seems to have shadows following her and a kewpie doll that moves by itself Cass wants to know more and while clearing the house she finds an exercise book that seems to have Minna’s story in it and the story unfolds.
This is a fabulous duel time story, the characters are fabulous and the setting just right for the atmospheric story, MS. Brooks pulled me into the story from the start and I felt like I was on the coast with all of the characters, no fault of the author but the formatting was terrible, but I loved the story and I do highly recommend this one.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my copy to read and review.
5 stars
January 8, 2026 by Review
