English Gothic

One of the most popular storytellers of all time, V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina) continues an astonishing saga of psychological suspense with this third book of the Landry Family series - soon to be a Lifetime movie! Driven from the ornate Dumas Mansion back to her beloved bayou, Ruby struggles to begin her life anew in this atmospheric and thrilling novel.

November 1816. Restless but naive Emeline Fitzpatrick is desperate to escape her stifling life in foggy Halifax. Her guardian is lining up repugnant suitors, but Emeline has her eyes set on a handsome lieutenant in the British navy. She just needs to persuade him to propose, or her one chance at happiness will be gone forever. But when Emeline’s hopes end in scandal, she finds herself with only one suitor left: the wealthy and enigmatic Captain Graves. Having already lost two wives to tragic circumstances, the unfortunate widower is seeking a new companion in his cloistered seaside manor.

On a blistering summer day in 1968, nine-year-old Tommy vanishes without a trace from Coram House, an orphanage on the shores of Lake Champlain. Some say a nun drowned him, others say he ran away. Or maybe he never existed. Fifty years later, his disappearance is still unsolved. Struggling true crime writer Alex Kelley needs a fresh start. When she’s asked to ghostwrite a book about the orphanage—and the abuses that occurred there—she packs up her belongings and moves to wintry Burlington, Vermont.

Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.

Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.

In April 1940, the ninth Duke of Rutland died in mysterious circumstances in one of the rooms of his family estate, Belvoir Castle. The mystery surrounding these rooms holds the key to a tragic story that is played out on the brutal battlefields of the Western Front and in the exclusive salons of Mayfair and Belgravia in the dying years of la belle époque. Uncovered is a dark and disturbing period in the history of the Rutland family, and one which they were determined to keep hidden for over 60 years. Sixty years on, The Secret Rooms is the true story of family secrets and one man’s determination to keep the past hidden at any cost.

Ever since Fern could remember, she and her mother have lived as servants in Wyndemere House, the old Gothic mansion of the Davenport family. She may have been a servant, but Fern developed a sweet friendship with Dr. Davenport's son, Ryder, and she was even allowed free range of the estate. But Dr. Davenport has remarried, and his new wife has very different ideas about a servant's place. Yet, for all her wrath, the cruel woman cannot break the mysterious bond between Ryder and Fern.

Alike in every single way...with one dark exception. As identical twins, their mother insists that everything about them be identical: their clothes, their toys, their friends...the number of letters in their names: Haylee Blossom Fitzgerald and Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald. If one gets a hug, the other must, too. If one gets punished, the other must be, too.

Seven months ago, Ollie surrendered to the darkness, abandoning me in the process. He stripped me of my walls, only to leave me defenseless. Now he's back, along with fresh new faces and obstacles standing in our way. He says to trust no one. Not even him. How am I supposed to be strong for us both when I'm losing my grip?

Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room across the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history, and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural idyll.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

I came back to Forsyth and agreed to be their Lady for two reasons: protection and revenge. They wanted to break me, but instead, they molded me into their perfect weakness. I was put through the gauntlet and came out stronger. I earned the title of Lady. Then they became my weakness. I agreed to sleep under their roof, but on my terms. Building trust takes time, but with all the threats nipping at our heels, that’s a luxury we don't have. We have to rely on one another despite our complicated pasts - to find a murderer, a stalker, and a traitor.

As a boy, William Bellman commits one small, cruel act: killing a bird with his slingshot. Little does he know the unforeseen and terrible consequences of the deed, which is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. By the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, William seems to be a man blessed by fortune - until tragedy strikes and the stranger in black comes. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, William enters into a rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner, to found a decidedly macabre business.

As identical twins, Haylee and Kaylee Fitzgerald have always done things in exactly the same way. Under their mother's guidance, their every outfit, every meal, and every thought was identical. But now things are different. With Kaylee back at home after her sister's betrayal, her life has been turned inside out. Both her mother and Haylee are away, and Kaylee's alone and more lost than ever.

Based on true crimes, The Specimen is a mesmerizing story about one woman’s search for truth and vengeance in the darkest of places—where the deadliest secrets lie hidden in plain sight on a freshly dusted shelf.

Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.

During the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father was executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security that his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost. But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined. Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will save her. Far from a refuge, San Isidro may be Beatriz’s doom.

The time is 1902. The setting, eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a 15-year-old Native American girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men. She finds Cameron and Greer, two gunmen taking a timeout from the game after an aborted job in Hawaii. Their violent past doesn't concern Magic Child. She wants them to kill a monster for her, one she says lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house, and one she says has killed before. But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels.

As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters—her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead.

The grand, Gothic Wyndemere House is a labyrinth, containing as many secrets as it does corners obscured in shadow. It's home to the Davenports, a wealthy and distinguished family, and Fern Corey and her mother have lived there as servants for Fern’s entire young life. Despite their difference in station, Fern and Dr. Davenport’s son, Ryder, have always been extremely close. Which was never a problem...until they came of age.