The secrets Mosse reveals are truly shocking; local men bound by a sinister agreement; threats; ghostly notes and gruesome discoveries.

So, all the ingredients are there to make this play scintillating and transportive, but there’s a sense that it wants to have its cake and eat it by yoking together a gothic mystery and revenge thriller. 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 the kind of cohesive power of a community to suppress secrets, unfortunately, is not something that’s gone away.Róisín McBrinn’s production – featuring violent moments going eyeball-to-eyeball with King Lear – is visually engulfing. I enjoyed this book but even after reading it twice I still don’t know when how or why Cassie could have had reparation, what could they have said, and when.

Despite it being 1912, our protagonist, the talented and intuitive Connie Gifford (an impressive Daisy Prosper), is the one making the taxidermy.

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. Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Observer Kate Mosse grew up in the slightly sinister Fishbourne marshlands she describes. We did pre-marriage counselling, which was successful, and a chemistry test – which is essential, because if you can’t find a flow, a sense that you can collaborate, then personally I’m not interested. 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.

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. Paul Wills fills a stage fringed with reeds and rushes with gauze boxes that, artfully lit by Prema Mehta, transform into vitrines housing a human skeleton and displays of stuffed birds. Throughout the piece, Mosse shows a remarkable, razor-sharp understanding of the damaged mind – a mind which in one case wraps itself in a protective carapace which starts to crumble and in the other demands the most brutal retribution. The story of the transformation of The Taxidermist’s Daughter from page to stage speaks of a place that has in some ways remained proudly parochial. And a woman who is believed less than the men around her, were she to have had the opportunity even to be heard.It’s also a reminder of the fact that we so rarely get a genuine thriller on any stage – and just how wonderful it is when we do.