There are a lot of mysteries, lies and contradictions to unravel. The significance of this becomes clear later, but for a long while I read it without getting a lot from it. I found the beginning an odd introduction to the Ashley family, the house, the history, coupled with a diary excerpt at the end of each chapter, dating from the nineteenth century. Danger.’ She returns home to Ashley Court in England to look for the answers but finds surprises and danger. The cat, it’s in the cat on the pavement. His last words to a friend, who wrote them down verbatim, are a warning to Bryony. When Bryony arrives her father is dead, killed in a hit-and-run road accident. Narrator Bryony is working at a hotel in Madeira when she receives a telepathic message from her anonymous ‘lover’ to go to her father who is staying at a clinic in Germany. The Ashley family in Touch Not the Cat own Ashley Court and have an unusual gift running through the generations: they are telepathic with each other. I can’t think of any other novels like them. Like all Stewart’s novels, there is adventure and romance with a slice of the supernatural. Published in 1976 – around the time I was borrowing my mother’s copies of Mary Stewart’s The Moon-Spinners and My Brother Michael and reading them voraciously – I had never read Touch Not the Cat until now.
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