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Visiting Salisbury Museum, I found myself eyeballing the last great bustard in Victorian England, shot down by a bird-scarer with a marble in 1871. The bustard's succulent innards had been consumed at a grand dinner hosted by the museum director, then it was stuffed and put in a glass case, where it's been ever since. Reading Kate Mosse's darkly lucid fable of skinning and disembowelling and stuffing, the bustard's arrested flight returned to haunt me.

The Taxidermist's Daughter is a jeu d'esprit in which ghosts and ghoulish patriarchal secrets, estranged female psyches and tumultuous bird-life coexist in a compulsively readable yarn with elements of folklore and beast fable. In folk tale the Corvidae family – crows, magpies, jackdaws, rooks – act as messengers and agents of justice. Here "the jackdaws were watching, silhouetted against the dusk sky", witnessing the crimes of human predators. The novel is a cabinet of curiosities, a tale of sexual predation and female revenge. Frankly, it's a cock and bull story, but so pleasurable is Mosse's storytelling brio that the reader is willingly borne along.

Leaving the terrain of Carcassonne, in which her blockbuster Languedoc Trilogy was set, Mosse comes home to her native Fishbourne, in Sussex. It's 1912, and 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, determined, and has a very strong stomach. She's a victim of traumatic memory loss, and the plot involves her mind's recuperation of obscene events 10 years previously.

A crime opens the story. Garotted with taxidermist's wire, a woman's corpse is found outside Blackthorn House, where Connie is attempting to stuff a jackdaw. Can it be the woman nicknamed "Birdie" by villagers?

The Taxidermist's Daughter delights in the technicalities of Connie's trade, a craft that in the early 20th century had gone out of vogue. Mosse exploits our queasy fascination with what lies under the skin, that libidinous peering and probing into a nudity beyond nakedness. Connie regards her craft as a calling, an art to be valued alongside the portraiture practised by Harry Woolston, the novel's rather feeble love interest. Respect for nature informs the taxidermist's "belief that in death, beauty could be found ... Each creature had left its imprint upon her as much as she had left her mark on it."

Mosse's prose is often exceptionally lyrical in its description of the natural world and the suffering of its mortal creatures. But the novel feels closer to Victorian pastiche than to realist narrative: Mosse's rural Sussex is unvisited by industry or the sort of radical modernity that troubles Hardy's agrarian Wessex. No rumour has reached her fictional world of suffragettes on the London streets or of striking miners. The Taxidermist's Daughter does not really pretend to be a historical novel. In Fishbourne "the old superstitions still hold sway"; its people inhabit the timeless territory of folklore. The marshlands and saltings, intimately known by the writer, represent a primitive border between life and death. The date of the blithe closing moments, 1913, is doubtless intended to be tacitly prescient: gentle Harry will be marched off to the trenches and may become a cadaver himself in short order. But that's another story.

Stevie Davies's novel Awakening is published by Parthian. To order The Taxidermist's Daughter for £13.59 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

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