The narrator here, Tony Britton, also deserves a mention as his reading is truly fantastic. There’s not a huge amount of action in it, and the main twist I saw coming pretty much from the start, but the writing is so damn good that, like Rebecca, you will not want to stop listening/reading until you find out how it all ends.ĭaphne Du Maurier’s novels are spoiling me – I feel like anything I listen to after one of her books is a step down! Hopefully it brings my own writing up a level… Mary-Ellen is a very strong female lead and it’s impossible not to like her, just as it’s impossible not to be drawn into this compelling tale. It’s there, but it’s not the focus of the book – this is a tale about a young woman thrown into a horrible situation by the death of her mother, trying to not only survive but see justice done for the terrible things going on at Jamaica Inn. There’s a little bit of romance, but no more than there is in, for example, my own Wolf’s Head. Jamaica Inn is no bustling drinking den in a busy city, as I expected – it’s a run-down old place, with a murderous landlord whose only patrons are the occasional smugglers who eventually turn out to be much worse than our hero Mary-Ellen suspects. This is a dark book, even darker than Rebecca and, rather than a cast of dozens, only a handful of characters are ever seen. Well, it’s nothing like that (thankfully)! Those could, I suppose, be classed as “romance” novels of a sort, so I expected Jamaica Inn would be much the same – perhaps some young barmaid’s ribald adventures in the titular tavern, fending off drunken oafs and jealous older women before finding love in some unlikely place. I bought this without even reading the synopsis because it was in a sale on Audible and I had really enjoyed this author’s other books Rebecca ( my review) and My Cousin Rachel ( review).

Jamaica inn author