English Gothic

Magic is seeping out of the world, leaving the witches who've relied on it for countless centuries increasingly hopeless. While some see an inevitable end of their era, others are courting madness - willing to sacrifice former allies, friends, and family to retain the power they covet. While the other witches watch their reality unravel, young Alice Marin is using magic's waning days to delve into the mystery of numerous disappearances in the occult circles of New Orleans.

From the first moment Vincentio di Vivaldi, a young nobleman, sets eyes on the veiled figure of Ellena, he is captivated by her enigmatic beauty and grace. But his haughty and manipulative mother is against the match and enlists the help of her confessor to come between them. Schedoni, previously a leading figure of the Inquisition, is a demonic, scheming monk with no qualms about the task, whether it entails abduction, torture - or even murder.

Lucy is a lapsed Catholic whose adolescent pretentions to sainthood are unexpectedly revived. It all starts when her cousin Zoltan, in hospital following a bizarre incident at a party, offers her a disturbing deathbed confession. Lucy's grief takes an unusual turn: Zoltan's death appears to have turned her into a magnet for the unshriven. Lucy is transformed into a self-described "flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall" as strangers unburden themselves to her. She becomes addicted to the dark stories and finds herself jonesing for hit after hit.

I was a thief. The guys I’m falling in love with turned me into a fighter. And when the city tried to make me disappear, I rebelled. But now I know the truth.

After a fire ruins my student house in my last year of university, I end up living with the Four Cardinals, the most popular guys at the Royal Academy of KnightsGate. They're pulling me into their circle, but I can't tell if they're guarding me from danger or if I'm stepping into a new one. Secrets are everywhere, and I need to find out the truth before I get too caught up.

A neuroscientist walks out of her life and isolates herself in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A recently orphaned graduate school dropout is hired as a "literary detective" to decode the work of a mysterious Internet poet who writes about disappearances and murders with an inexplicably precise knowledge of private details. And a virologist discovers her identity has been stolen by a conceptual artist in whose stories someone always goes missing.

"They branded me as a thief - but with everything at stake, they'll soon find out I'm a fighter." Sterling Falls is a dark, gothic reverse harem romance series with enemies to lovers, romantic suspense, and new adult themes. Fighter is book two in the Sterling Falls Series and a continuation of Thief - it is not a stand-alone.

Chuck Dutton built Music City Salvage with patience and expertise, stripping historic properties and reselling their bones. Inventory is running low, so he's thrilled when Augusta Withrow appears in his office offering salvage rights to her entire property. This could be a gold mine, so he assigns his daughter, Dahlia, to personally oversee the project. The crew finds a handful of surprises right away. Firstly, the place is in unexpectedly good shape. And then there's the cemetery, about 30 fallen and overgrown graves dating to the early 1900s.

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.

From the first night I bedded her, I knew I was playing with fire. And now I must face the consequences. I betrayed my best friend. A man who was more a brother to me than my own blood. And now I fear I have lost her too. She claims men hold all the power in our world, but she has brought me to my knees. I love her. I know that now. Too little too late. Breaking a heart is easy. Mending one is more complicated. But a predator lies in wait of her. And I’ll do anything I must to keep her safe.

A man condemned...Falsely accused of murder and mute from a near-fatal beating, Apollo Greaves, Viscount Kilbourne has escaped from Bedlam. With the Crown's soldiers at his heels, he finds refuge in the ruins of a pleasure garden, toiling as a simple gardener. But when a vivacious young woman moves in, he's quickly driven to distraction...A desperate woman...London's premier actress, Lily Stump, is down on her luck when she's forced to move into a scorched theatre with her maid and small son.

When Alice's husband disappears while investigating a series of strange and terrible incidents in the bustling seaport of Salem, she is forced to bring her young daughter, Abigail, along from Boston while she takes up the search. But she soon learns of a terrible curse that has the entire town bracing for nightfall: One hundred years after the infamous witch trials, the vengeful spirit of a woman hanged for witchcraft will rise from hell to claim the souls of Salem's children.

Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm. But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda’s peculiar and precarious life.

Like everyone else in Palm Springs, Gish idolizes her smart, beautiful, kind older sister. Even their parents compare Gish unfavorably to Gloria—threatening to send her to boarding school once the more perfect sister leaves for college.

Sixteen-year-old Sage is a lonely child. Her adoptive parents watch her obsessively, as if studying her for warning signs of...something. And maybe they're right to - even she can't make sense of the strange things she sees and hears. She possesses knowledge that other teenagers don't, that her parents and teachers - no adult - could possibly have. So when Sage finally makes a friend who understands her alarming gift, he becomes her confidant, a precarious link to the truth about who she really is.

Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her listeners beyond the veneer of the ordinary - even beyond the gloss of the fantastical - to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.

In 1919, Kitty Weekes, pretty, resourceful, and on the run, falsifies her background to obtain a nursing position at Portis House, a remote hospital for soldiers left shell-shocked by the horrors of the Great War. Hiding the shame of their mental instability in what was once a magnificent private estate, the patients suffer from nervous attacks and tormenting dreams. But something more is going on at Portis House—its plaster is crumbling, its plumbing makes eerie noises, and strange breaths of cold waft through the empty rooms.

Best-selling author Robert Jackson Bennett has won widespread critical acclaim for his unique brand of darkly inventive fiction. In The Troupe, 16-year-old George Carole joins vaudeville in search of Heironomo Silenus, the man he believes to be his father. But what he discovers casts a dark pall over his world: Silenus' troupe hides a dangerous secret - one that invites death to all in its vicinity.

The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life.

After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and house mate in Exeter. She’s always avoided dwelling on the past, even before the war, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she’d never return. A more sensible soul would have delivered the package and left without rehashing old wounds. But no one has ever accused Ruby of being sensible.