A haunting masterpiece from storyteller Mal Peet. Part ghost story, part detective novel, MR GODLEY’S PHANTOM has its own distinctive fifties flavour of cigarettes, petrol and musty interiors. As always, Mal Peet’s timing and pacing are faultless, with cinematic cutting between scenes, pitch-perfect dialogue and deftly brilliant sentences.
It’s 1945 and Martin Heath, like many men at that time, is struggling to settle, to find his place again after the horrors of war. But an old comrade sends him a letter, telling of a position that’s just come up with an elderly fellow called Mr Godley in the deepest and loneliest part of Devon. Martin travels there and so begins a dark mystery…