I loved this! Lauren Westwood is a new author for me, but before I was even halfway through this one I was looking to see which other books she had written and mentally adding them to my wishlist.

When Juno Cartwright discovers that her husband is cheating on her, she takes her two children – seventeen-year-old Bridget and her younger brother, Connor – and heads for Cornwall, where she has conveniently just inherited a cottage from a distant relative. At least, she thinks it’s a cottage…until they arrive at the Cross Keys, a crumbling old inn on the Cornish coast. Discovering that the inn is actually her inheritance, Juno intends to put it up for sale, but the longer she spends there the more she begins to feel at home. Connor is having fun exploring the cliffs, caves and beaches of Penglas Cove, but Bridget is disgusted with the whole situation – the inn has no internet connection, no showers, and she just wants to go back to London.

Two centuries earlier, in 1820, Bess Trevelyan arrived in Cornwall to marry Lord Robert Penhelion. It was an unhappy marriage and, according to legend, Bess had a lover – Penhelion’s brother, a sea captain – and had taken refuge in the Cross Keys Inn to wait for the return of his ship. When Penhelion learned of the affair, he paid the innkeeper, Old John Dog, to murder her. Juno is fascinated by this legend, particularly as she and Bridget seem to bear a striking resemblance to the portrait of Bess Trevelyan hanging on the wall in the inn. As Juno tries to find out more about Bess and her tragic story, it seems that history is beginning to repeat itself.

This is such an atmospheric novel! Penglas Cove and the Cross Keys Inn – complete with an adjoining smugglers’ museum and pirate cave with waxwork figures playing out the story of Bess Trevelyan – are so vividly described they feel like real places. In her author’s note, Westwood acknowledges Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek and Winston Graham’s Poldark series, as well as her own visits to Cornwall, and you can see the influence of all of these on her writing.

I loved our narrator, Juno, but she also has a strong cast of supporting characters around her; my favourites were Cliff and Elspeth, two elderly people who run the museum and pirate cave and who become almost like family to Juno and her children. And then there’s Bess, whose story unfolds in the form of a dual narrative. We don’t spend as long with Bess as we do with Juno, but it’s long enough to get to know her and to discover that there’s more to her story than anyone in the present day knows. Both threads of the novel were fascinating and it was all so readable that I finished it in two days, which could have been less if I’d had nothing else to do!

Although smuggling and piracy are things we tend to associate with times gone by, they do of course still exist today and in the modern day storyline Westwood explores the forms smuggling and trafficking can take in the 21st century. This gives the novel more relevancy and a more serious tone, but I personally would have preferred just to focus on the Bess mystery and Juno’s efforts to renovate the inn and build a new life for herself and the children. Still, I found The Inn at Penglas Cove a very entertaining and enjoyable read and just need to decide which Lauren Westwood book I should read next.

Thanks to Boldwood Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.