BELLMAN & BLACK Eagerly awaited, the new novel Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield, author of acclaimed The Thirteenth Tale, starts off with four boys doing what ten year old boys do – playing and having fun, feeling that whilst they have the world ahead of them they are also quite grown up and invincible! That day William Bellman tries out his new catapult with dire consequences. Boasting of his aim he takes a shot at a rook – and kills it! Stunned, the boys experience a mixture of feelings, awe and surprise that William actually hit it, horror and guilt that he killed the bird. Ten year old boys being what they are they decide to bury the bird but after closely examining the bird and exclaiming over its colours they take to scaring each other with it and eventually leave its small, broken body just lying there – insult added to injury. But William can’t shake that guilty feeling and running home after feels he is being watched by many eyes; it’s a feeling that, although William manages to bury his guilt and his memory of that incident, stay with him for a long time...... Over the years William becomes a successful business man, he has a family he loves and is well liked but as his success grows so does the grief and loss in his life and then there’s the unsettling feeling of being observed.....Entering into a rather strange contract, with a stranger he calls Mr Black, William’s business empire grows ever more successful but William is no longer the man he was. What has led him to being this way and will he be able to change it? Bellman & Black is set in Victorian England and focusing on death and grief it has an almost macabre fairytale style to it as we follow William’s life to its conclusion and as such makes an easy and interesting read; there is certainly a feeling that there is something sinister and inevitable going on but at the end the reader has to draw their own conclusions about that as there is no big surprise. I did like the informative parts about the rooks but sometimes it was a little hard to see the relevance or parallel to the story. Overall I thought there was a haunted feeling and sadness to the whole story and it was certainly well told. It’s a book that still has me thinking about it so I do count that as a plus and I did enjoy it, it was a thoughtful read, evocative of the Victorian era, with a central character that did interest me. I’m going to take the view that the final decision over the haunting and the possible moral of the tale was deliberately left to the individual reader to figure out and not simply an end without explanation. As such I would give it 4/5. Thanks to netgalley for allowing me to review this book.