I’ve very much enjoyed turning 60,” says Kate Mosse, tipping several sachets of sugar into a cup of takeaway coffee. It’s 9am, and the bestselling novelist and founder of the Women’s prize for fiction has travelled up to London from her home on the Sussex coast to sit in on a rehearsal of her first full-length play, staged at Chichester Festival theatre. The play has a large supporting cast, but its strongest support comes from Posy Sterling (as servant Mary) and Akai Osei (as errand boy Davey), who both work well together with Proper’s Connie, and add light to the proceedings. Geoff Aymer, as long-suffering Lewis the butler, also adds some droll humour. What happens instead is a murder. A few days later the body of a young woman is found floating in a stream beside the house of our heroine, 22 year old Connie Gifford. The woman has been garrotted with a taxidermist’s wire. Connie suspects her alcoholic father of the crime; he is indeed the local taxidermist, once wealthy owner of a fabled museum, now a failed drunk since te vogue for stuffed birds fell out of fashion. Mosse is an engaging storyteller, deftly dealing with the intricacies of her involving, gruesome plot” Fishbourne, where Connie lives, is hauntingly described by Mosse, who tells us this is a love letter to her home village. The Sussex landscape is lyrically evoked and Connie is a strong and vibrant heroine.

Although the book is set in 1912, only two years before the outbreak of the Great War, the atmosphere in remote Fishbourne seems almost Victorian, perfect for Mosse’s theme of taxidermy (which involves plenty of gory disembowelling) and dark, homicidal secrets. But although this wonderful novel ends on a note of hope, the reader is all too aware that only a couple of years in the future, the world will be plunged into darkness. In archetypal gothic fashion, it’s a harbinger of what is to come, but the play’s most pressing conundrum is the amnesia that Connie Gifford (Daisy Prosper) has suffered since she fell down a flight of stairs when she was 12. She has fleeting flashes of what happened, involving a mysterious woman called Cassie, but has never been able to fully reconstruct what led up to her fall. Years ago, when we first began to visit Cornwall our kids were fascinated by the Victorian museum of stuffed animals, then housed at Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.

Mosse’s main trade is impressive novels which may make her dialogue sometimes baldly explanatory – “I had an accident when I was a child. I don’t always remember” – in the way of a narrator’s usually candid relationship with the reader, rather than more ambiguous theatre speech, leaving actors space to grace-notes with voice and face. More subtext is generally what the piece needs: the story is always plotty and enjoyable but metaphors suggested by the dominant morbid imagery might have been pushed further in the script. Gripping, moving and intricately written, The Taxidermist’s Daughter will surely delight [Mosse’s] legions of fans. It’s perfectly paced and impossible to put down” It starts with a spurt of high theatricality: smoke and spotlights and singing and wildlife, all amid a deluge of rain in a Sussex churchyard. And if this atmospheric opening of Kate Mosse’s adaptation of her gothic suspense novel from 2014 teeters on the edge of absurdity, it holds its balance and doesn’t topple over.

The Taxidermist’s Daughter is set in the momentous year of 1912, yet this fact seems far from important. Kate Mosse omits mention of the year’s defining events – the sinking of the Titanic, the suffragette movement, industrialisation – and focuses, instead, on the events of a small, insular, marshland town, Fishbourne, in Sussex, and its occupants. Drawing on traditional ghost stories and gothic literature, the microcosmic nature of the setting – cut off from the developments of the rest of the country – conjures a world in which realism is of little concern; rather, here, spectacle and suspense take priority. And with the discovery on the marshes of the washed-up body of a woman in a cobalt hooded coat, strangled with taxidermist’s wire, Connie becomes determined to unearth the terrors of her past. Opinion | Don't sneer at celebrities on the West End. They're saving theatre 27 October, 2023 Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage's new drama Clyde's fails to convince 25 October, 2023 Philip Guston at the Tate Modern is an outstanding exhibition of crisis, violence and injustice 21 October, 2023 Mosse weaves some difficult themes into the narrative, such as the effects of sexual violence, murder and grief, and her descriptions of the marshlands of Fishbourne – where she herself grew up – are outstanding. Her writing in these passages comes alive and, in turn, breathes life into the setting. The dangers of the marshland – the wind has “teeth”, and the water “pulses” – cleverly echo and magnify the suspenseful and precarious nature of its inhabitants’ lives.As Connie, newcomer Daisy Prosper has charm and command in the difficult part of a central character who is usually less informed than the audience. Pearl Chanda as Cassie, a woman defined by mystery, avoids the floaty tone that such roles risk, finding psychological specificity. Raad Rawi’s distinguished but disconcerting Dr Woolston could have walked out of a Wilkie Collins story – as, in a sense, he has. The ghoulishness of stuffed, menacing birds, was offset by the charming set-pieces of hamsters and guinea pigs, sitting at desks in a tiny schoolroom, or all dressed up for a wedding.

The one thing that elevates the play is Paul Wills’s design, a feast for the eyes making intelligent use of every inch of the capacious stage, and working in brilliant tandem with Prema Mehta’s lighting and Sinéad Diskin’s sound. Together, they impressively evoke the rain-lashed marshlands, storm waves crashing into sea walls, the town square, the church, various other interiors, Connie’s fragments of memory and the Giffords’ cabinets of curiosities. And all with an economy of transition from scene to scene.It took some help from Mosse’s actor son, Felix, to excavate the play from the novel. “As a novelist, I’m used to being responsible for the whole world. He would often say, ‘The actor will play that, Mum.’ On the stage, you have flesh and blood, so don’t tell the actor how to act.” The big structural decision was to turn the story from a gothic mystery – which only unravels towards the end, as Connie’s memories return – to a revenge drama involving, from the outset, a second woman, Cassie, who is a shadow presence for most of the novel.

An interconnected dual mystery is at the core of the novel, whose heroine, Constantia Gifford, practises her father’s trade, for with the failure of his once-thriving business, Gifford’s World Famous House of Avian Curiosities, the taxidermist has sunk into drunken inertia. Connie is bright, beautiful and determined. She is a victim of traumatic memory loss and the plot involves her mind’s retrieval of obscene happenings 10 years previously. The closer we come to understanding the events and characters of the present, the more of her dark past is revealed, and vice versa. Clues carefully placed throughout neatly come together in a climax that has all the ingredients of a typical gothic thriller – a storm and a flood, a fallen woman and the reveal of a gruesome crime. Kate Mosse’s gothic yarn owes plenty to both Collins and Hill: there are spooky goings on, treacherous tidal waters and asylum incarcerations. Rosin McBrinn’s direction keeps the action taut, but there’s no getting away from the fact that there’s a tad too much exposition and not enough dramatic meat linking the disparate elements of the plot for the uniformly excellent actors to chew on. Which is why when Connie fully regains her memory, during a macabre vignette featuring four men in penguin suits and bird masks enacting an arcane ritual, it feels like overwrought padding. The novel in question is The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which is set around Mosse’s home near Chichester in the unusually stormy year of 1912. Sea water surges through the marshes and carrion birds gather ominously above the local church as long-submerged evils bubble to the surface, confronting the eponymous heroine Connie Gifford with memories she lost years earlier in a mysterious childhood accident. The Titanic had just sunk but nobody was talking about that This play is not for the squeamish because detailed descriptions of the process of taxidermy abound. Taxidermy, specifically of the avian and – queasily – human varieties, is the nifty storytelling device on which Mosse swathes the skin of her story and keeps the plot zipping along.A dark but thrilling play about country superstition, power dynamics and artistry, adapted by Kate Mosse from her Gothic novel, and rightly debuting in the Sussex county where the action takes place. It’s the same year that the suffragettes started using militant tactics but curiously, given the play’s message of female empowerment, that newsworthiness doesn’t seem to have penetrated the sleepy facade of this village, a hotbed of sordid secrets in this story. This is an excellent gothic romp of a novel, and Mosse sets it in her native Sussex, where the marshes are both haunting and threatening, and the sea is prone to dramatic flooding.