Gothic English Mystery

They were a perfect and beautiful family - until a heartbreaking tragedy shattered their happiness. Now, for the sake of an inheritance that will ensure their future, the children must be hidden away out of sight, as if they never existed. They are kept in the attic of their grandmother’s labyrinthine mansion, isolated and alone. As the visits from their seemingly unconcerned mother slowly dwindle, the four children grow ever closer and depend upon one another to survive both this cramped world and their cruel grandmother.

A troubled Byronic hero, a young governess blinded by her romantic obsession, a beautiful but forbidding manor, and a secret as ominous as the black rainbow that frames the huddled towers of the manor in the moonlight are the romantic elements of this Gothic mystery.

After years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in Nana’s crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. Finally back together one last time, when the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. Then at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows…

When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she’s not only North Carolina’s richest woman, she’s also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family’s estate high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But in the aftermath of her death, her adopted son, Camden, wants little to do with the house or the money—and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes.

In the midst of the woods stands a house called Lichen Hall. This place is shrouded in folklore—old stories of ghosts, of witches, of a child who is not quite a child. Now the woods are creeping closer, and something has been unleashed. Pearl Gorham arrives in 1965, one of a string of young women sent to Lichen Hall to give birth. And she soon suspects the proprietors are hiding something. Then she meets the mysterious mother and young boy who live in the grounds—and together they begin to unpick the secrets of this place.

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

In 1890, Corrine Dixon meets and is swept away by the charms of rich, sophisticated, and handsome Garland Foxworth. After discovering that she’s pregnant, Garland does what appears to be the honorable thing and marries her in a huge wedding ceremony on the luxurious Foxworth Hall grounds while both families keep her pregnancy a secret. Now the mistress of the labyrinthine estate, Corrine discovers that nothing is what is seems. Garland is not the man she expected, and she’s uncomfortable with his intense infatuation with his deceased mother’s memory.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life....

Chris and Cathy made such a loving home for 14-year-old Jory - so handsome, so gentle. And for Bart, who had such a dazzling imagination for a nine-year-old. Then the lights came on in the house next door. Soon the Old Lady in Black was there, watching them, guarded by her strange old butler. Soon she had Bart over for cookies and ice cream and asked him to call her "Grandmother". And soon Bart's transformation began....

As her wedding to Lord Darkefell approaches, Lady Anne is summoned by a local girls' school to help them with a young student troubled by ghostly apparitions. She's quick to respond, and quick to discover the trickery behind the so-called ghosts. But despite her efforts to demonstrate to the student that she's been the victim of a cruel hoax, the young woman apparently jumps to her death the very next night. Stunned and saddened by the turn of events, Lady Anne soon realizes that what she thought was a prank was a dark precursor to foul play.

For five generations, Evelyn's family has lived in the same small brick house, shadowed by the mansion across the street. Her Nana filled her childhood with stories about Byrne House: tales of missing children, of lovers gone mad. The mansion loomed every night in her dreams. Even now, at 17, Evelyn watches the sprawling Victorian from her second-floor bedroom, unable to explain her obsession with a house she's never been inside.

For more than two centuries, Winterbourne Hall has stood atop a bluff overseeing the English countryside of Cornwall and the sea beyond. In 1947, Londoner Alice Miller accepts a post as governess at Winterbourne, looking after Captain Jonathan de Grey’s twin children. Falling under the de Greys’ spell, Alice believes the family will heal her own past sorrows. But then, the twins’ adoration becomes deceitful and taunting. Their father, ever distant, turns spiteful and cruel. The manor itself seems to lash out. Alice finds her surroundings subtly altered, her air slightly chilled.

After years of self-exile, Jacinda “Jac” Brodie is back in Brook Haven, South Carolina. But the small cliffside town no longer feels like home. Jac hasn’t been there since the beloved chief of police fell to his death—and all the whispers said she was to blame. That chief was Jac’s father. Racked with guilt, Jac left town with no plans to return. But when her granddad lands in the hospital, she rushes back to her family, bracing herself to confront the past.

Med school dropout Lena is desperate for a job, any job, to help her parents, who are approaching bankruptcy after her father was injured and laid off nearly simultaneously. So when she is offered a position, against all odds, working for one of Boston’s most elite families, the illustrious and secretive Verdeaus, she knows she must accept—no matter how bizarre the interview or how vague the job description. By day, she is assistant to the family doctor and his charge—the sickly, poetic, drunken heir to the family empire, who is as difficult as his illness is mysterious.

Kate agrees to an arranged marriage with the mysterious Thomas Westwood to save her family's estate, but not everyone welcomes her at Wishwood, her husband's crumbling manor. The family members talk about a curse, lights move through the ruins at night, and Kate's maid won't spend the night in the house. Thomas is hiding something from Kate as well, but as she grows closer to him, a series of accidents makes her suspect that someone is willing to kill to keep Wishwood's secrets buried in the past.

Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out. At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six awful days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged.

Portrait of the Medical Student as a Young Body Snatcher. Yet I must insist that in the end, this is not a story about Death. It is perhaps a Life story, or even—yes—a Love story. It is the story of how I clawed my way from the decay of a crumbling legacy into the modern era of Reason and Science. It is the story of how I escaped the prison of archaic superstition to the freedom of enlightenment. It is the story of how a rose can blossom from even the bloodiest soil, of how light can grow from shadow, how love can grow from despair.

The Lost Country centers on Edgewater, who's recently been discharged from the navy, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish who takes him under his wing as they both search desperately for a forgotten past and a future that may never come. The Lost Country cements Gay as one of the strongest voices in Southern literature, alongside Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner.

"Mom seems off." Her brother's words echo in Sam Montgomery's ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone. She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam's excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out. But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be.

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.