Gothic English Mystery

In the 1940s, Coden, Alabama, was a hideaway for movie stars - an isolated playground tucked among live oaks and placid bay waters where pleasure and vice could be indulged. By the summer of 1974 Coden’s glamour has faded, but it doesn’t bother Mimi Bosarge, who is just happy to have a job as a live-in tutor with the wealthiest family in town, the Hendersons. When the Hendersons generously open their arms to Annie, a troubled teenager with no recollection of her past, Mimi’s greatest concern is creating a curriculum for the family’s new ward.

Alexandra Belarus is a struggling artist living in New York City, even though her family is rich in real estate, including a towering Gothic Gramercy Park building built by her great-great-grandfather. But the truth of her bloodline is revealed when she is attacked on the street and saved by an inhumanly powerful winged figure. A figure who knows the Belarus name....

From the depths of a valley rises the city of Mahala. It's a city built upwards, not across - where streets are built upon streets, buildings upon buildings. A city that the Ministry rules from the sunlit summit, and where the forsaken lurk in the darkness of Under. Rojan Dizon doesn't mind staying in the shadows, because he's got things to hide. Things like being a pain-mage, with the forbidden power to draw magic from pain. But he can't hide forever. Because when Rojan stumbles upon the secrets lurking in the depths of the Pit, the fate of Mahala will depend on him using his magic.

A young graduate student travels to Walden Pond expecting to find inspiration in the quiet solitude but instead finds something eerie and malevolent living deliberately in Thoreau's woods. When graduate student Aine Cahill uncovers a journal proving that her aunt Bonnie was an intimate companion of Henry David Thoreau during his supposedly solitary sojourn at Walden Pond, she knows that she has found the perfect subject for her dissertation. She decides to travel to Walden Pond herself to hunker down and work on her writing, but it quickly becomes clear that all is not as it seems....

The Interpretation of Murder opens on a hot summer night in 1909 as Sigmund Freud arrives in New York. Among those waiting to greet him is Dr. Stratham Younger, a gifted physician who is one of Freud's most ardent American supporters. And so begins the visit that will be the great genius' first and only journey to America.

Turn to me, Natalie. His mental call to her was dangerous, of course. Dangerous for him. Dangerous for her too, but she was in danger, anyway. Look at me now. Her gaze traveled slowly upward. With every moment, physical awareness stretched tauter between them. Her eyes wandered over Julian's face, over his slashing dark brows, down the ridge of his aquiline nose to his chiseled mouth.

Clara grew up believing that her mother's family had disowned them. But the grandmother Clara never knew is now entreating her to visit Thurnley Hall, the family seat in Yorkshire. The old lady is on her deathbed and anxious to disclose vital family secrets before it's too late - for Clara's unborn child may be cursed with a horrible fate.

Taylor has been able to reunite all the different races. The witches, vampires, and werewolves will fight with all they have to keep the fey from taking over our world. Taylor holds onto Jesse and together they take on the impossible. When Taylor gets kidnapped and is taken into a secret portal world by The Ice Pack, her life will be changed forever. Doomed to live the rest of her existence there, she fights to get back home to Big Bear Lake, to be with the one she loves.

Rainey Bliss Adams desperately needed a new start when she and her daughter Ariel relocated from St. Louis to Old Gate and settled into the house where the Bliss family had lived for over a century. Rainey's husband had been killed in a freak explosion that left her 14 year-old daughter Ariel scarred and disfigured. At the grand housewarming party, Bliss House begins to reveal itself again.

Jessie Speer set out for California, following her father's dream which turned into a nightmare and killed her family. Now, snow-clogged mountains, beautiful but heartless, held her prisoner. She prayed for a miracle. Blizzard after blizzard left her aching with cold, one step away from starvation. As months passed, Jessie almost stopped believing in warmth, safety and rescue. Only Daniel Bear was willing to brave the fearsome mountain to answer the stranded settler's desperate need.

In the dim light of Ravenwood Manor, Eleanor encounters Lord Nathaniel Ravenscroft—the last descendant of the cursed lineage. Haunted by the sins of his ancestors, Lord Nathaniel has dedicated his life to unearthing the truth behind the malevolent entity and the family's dark legacy. Together, they form an unlikely alliance, bound by their shared heritage and their quest for redemption. As they delve deeper into the shadows that have plagued the Ravenscroft family, Eleanor and Lord Nathaniel confront malevolent entities and unearth long-buried family secrets.

Having discovered many of Anton's secrets, Katja must now seek out Raven and attempt to rescue him from the nightmare that his life has become. As she seeks him out, Raven is being eaten up by the horror of his own past. A past full of guilt, pain, and a terrible revenant who is more than she seems. In time, these two paths will come to meet and a final confrontation that could mean the end of so many things will be in store.

Epic love requires an epic sacrifice.... A long time ago, I borrowed money from a very powerful family. I paid my debt, but they have come for more. They want everything that I have built and they will hurt her if I refuse. Harley doesn’t understand why I have to break her heart. She hates me, but at least she’s okay...for now. But what happens when sending her away isn’t enough? What happens when I lose everything?

Lila Grace Carter talks to dead people. Admittedly, that's not out of the ordinary in Lockhart, South Carolina. In her words, "I'm Southern. We all talk to dead people down here. As a matter of fact, I don't believe I can truly trust anybody that doesn't speak to at least two or three dead relations on a daily basis. The difference is, they talk back to me." Now there's a murderer on the loose in Lockhart, and Lila Grace is the only one who knows a crime was committed. Can she convince the sexy sheriff that Jenny Miller didn't fall down the steps on her own? Will she catch the killer?

In the remote Andean village of Colibrí, a boy discovers what appears to be the body of an angel. But in the face and wounds of the dead, winged woman, Dr. Gregory Moreno sees something even more disturbing: an uncanny resemblance to his beloved late wife that cannot be mere chance. And in American anthropologist Sophie Lawson, still more echoes of the doctor's lost love stir...igniting the superstitions of the townspeople, and an elusive killer's deepest desires and despair.

Mark and Maggie's annual drive east to visit family has gotten off to a rocky start. By the time they're on the road, it's late, a storm is brewing, and they are no longer speaking to one another. Adding to the stress, Maggie - recently mugged at gunpoint - is lately not herself, and Mark is at a loss about what to make of the stranger he calls his wife.

Listeners know that few authors are able to create an atmosphere of unease and terror as well as Oates, a fact confirmed by the four novellas presented here. All the novellas in this collection revolve around the theme of love gone wrong - horribly, shockingly wrong.

Young Christmas Channing returns to Jeff because he tells her that his life's in danger, that he's being poisoned with arsenic by his wife. But when she arrives at Morgan House, she doesn't find what she expects - only David, the strange, secretive brother-in-law; Mary, Jeff's cunning, crafty spouse; and Jeff himself, the handsome but vastly changed young man whom she'd once loved, but does not now understand. Chris is lost, confused, and swept into a powerful undertow of danger, panic, and past love.

When Liza Durant is saved from drowning by Jeffrey Forrest, she little realizes how much this chance meeting will change her life. For Jeffrey is the heir both to a large business, and to the great estate that lies near it, dominated by the old manor house called La Deuxième - “The Second.” Within days he proposes to the beautiful young woman; she neither accepts nor declines, but says that she'll visit him at his country home. But Jeffrey's father is killed, Jeffrey's so-called accidental death soon follows, and Liza finds herself enmeshed in a web of intrigue.

At 10 years old, Hadley Dixon's life changed forever. Since those few tragic weeks, she's tried to keep the past buried, but old bones have a way of rising up. Grown now, Hadley can't hide any longer. Haunted by a boy who never made it home, a woman who sings in moonlight and dances in flames, and the strange, scarred recluse who watches it all from the shadow of the pines, the time has come for Hadley to pay for her sins.