Book Review: The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis

Happy Monday bookish people! I hope you’re all having a good day today. Today I am bringing you my book review for The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis, the first in her Bronte mystery series.

It’s a new year and that means I am changing up the way I write my book reviews, let me down below what you think of this new style.

I will not be splitting my reviews up into sections anymore. I will be writing a few paragraphs of my overall thoughts about the book instead and then I will be giving an overall star rating at the end. I hope you enjoy my book review!

Before they became legendary writers, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë were detectors in this charming historical mystery…

Yorkshire, 1845. A young wife and mother has gone missing from her home, leaving behind two small children and a large pool of blood. Just a few miles away, a humble parson’s daughters–the Brontë sisters–learn of the crime. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are horrified and intrigued by the mysterious disappearance.

These three creative, energetic, and resourceful women quickly realize that they have all the skills required to make for excellent “lady detectors.” Not yet published novelists, they have well-honed imaginations and are expert readers. And, as Charlotte remarks, “detecting is reading between the lines–it’s seeing what is not there.”

As they investigate, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are confronted with a society that believes a woman’s place is in the home, not scouring the countryside looking for clues. But nothing will stop the sisters from discovering what happened to the vanished bride, even as they find their own lives are in great peril…

My Review:

I have had this book sitting on my shelves for a long, long time. It has only been in the past year as I have started reading more historical mysteries that I realised how much I enjoyed them. So, finally as my last book of 2023 I read The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis.

This book captures the personalities of the three Bronte sisters extremely well, you can see the wildness of Emily and the quiet nature of Anne and the sensible longing Charlotte. I personally enjoyed the chapters written in Charlotte’s perspective the most but that makes sense considering Jane Eyre is my favourite Classic novel. I did like how the book mixed the perspectives of the sisters together, it gave each of them space to investigate on their own and discover integral information and develop their own identities within the novel.

One of the things I loved the most about this novel was the way that the mystery worked. It was a tangled web of secrets and darkness that started unfolding more and more with each turn of the page. Throughout I had my own suspicion as to who the murderer was going to be, and this was the most clever part of the novel because I was completely wrong. I could have given 100 guesses and not a single one of them would have come close to the actual ending. Normally, this kind of thing annoys me a bit, I can feel cheated as a reader sometimes if the mystery doesn’t leave you enough hints, but for this novel it really worked.

If you love historical mysteries I would highly recommend this book.