Paperbacks: Sepulchre, by Kate Mosse

For anyone who religiously avoids novels about bloodlines, the occult and ecclesiastical manuscripts the window for escape is closing.

Even blockbusters aimed at women are no longer a conspiracy-free zone. After the commercial success of her 2005 novel Labyrinth, Kate Mosse returns to France for a story of fin-de-siècle phantoms and buried treasure. Told as a dual narrative, the novel moves between the 1890s and the present day, as two young women, centuries apart, try to unlock the secrets of a set of tarot cards with associations to Rennes-les-Bains, the village at the heart of The Da Vinci Code. Thewalls dividing the past and the present, the living and the dead, prove to be dangerously thin.