In The Magpie Tree, we are drawn once more into Ms. Stansfield's dark, haunting, well-drawn world of mid 1800's Cornwall. We follow Shilly and her new partner in detecting crime, Anna Drake, away from the windswept, wide-open moors into the thickets, riverine valleys, and tangled woods of Cornwall's coast.
 
Within this dim, claustrophobic, and shifting place of shadows, a child has gone missing. It falls to Shilly and Anna to sift through the scant leads: a fortune of missing silver taken piece by piece; a saint who rings an invisible bell to warn of tragedy; two mysterious women who drift through the forests depths, speaking the language of the devil, and a strange illness which cannot be explained. Somehow all the threads must tie together, but for Shilly and Anna, the only way for them to learn the truth is to venture down a dark and dangerous path soaked with superstition and slippery with lies.
 
The Magpie Tree is a beautiful, haunting book. It is a story of hardship, sorrow, loss, deception, greed, desperation and love. In Shilly we find a woman who, on the grand stage of a Victorian England is no one; who calls herself 'a nothing soul'. Yet, for all her simplicity, she captures our minds and our hearts. Her thoughts, often delivered in words as bare as floorboards are not simple at all, rather she is layered, and within her thoughts, we hear echoes of our own fears of alienation, of loneliness, of the need for love.
 
In Shilly and Anna, Ms Stansfield offers us broken, yet deeply courageous women who have been relegated to a life on the fringe of a patriarchal society, and who must face continual insecurity and uncertainty. Yet despite their fetters, they press on together, facing both the darkness of their world and of their minds, to make their way forward on their own terms, as free as the magpies who watch them from St Nectan's hidden, ancient tree.