Gothic Psychological Suspense

Investigative journalist Susan "Stripe" McLachlan is constantly hounded by eager documentarians for interview requests about the Night Scrawler murders. One of the victims of the mysterious serial killer was a member of her own family: her father. At the peak of her career, her services are sought by Isaac Payne, who commissions her to write an article for his website. As she learns more about Isaac, Stripe digs up fresh secrets about the murders, arousing her suspicions. After an awkward confrontation, she wakes up in Isaac’s bed — with a chain around her ankle.

Donna Weaver has put everything she has into restoring The Breakers, an old bed and breakfast on a remote stretch of beach in Galloway. Now it sits waiting - freshly painted, richly furnished, filled with flowers - for the first guests to arrive. But Donna's guests, a contentious group of estranged cousins, soon realize that they've been here before, years ago. Decades have passed, but that night still haunts them: a 16th birthday party that started with peach schnapps and ended with a girl walking into the sea.

Former teen star Liv Hendricks quit acting after her younger sister disappeared following a Hollywood party gone wrong. Liv barely escaped with her life. But all this time, someone's been waiting patiently to finish what was started.... Now 15 years later, Liv is forced to return to the spotlight. She crowdfunds a webseries in which she'll pose as a real-life detective - a nod to the show she starred on as a teen. When a mysterious donor challenges her to look into a series of disappearances outside a town made famous by the horror movies filmed there, Liv has no choice but to accept.

Sixty seconds after she wakes from a coma, Maggie's world is torn apart. The police tell her that her daughter, Elspeth, is dead. That she drowned when the car Maggie had been driving plunged into the river. Maggie remembers nothing. When Maggie begs to see her husband, Sean, the police tell her that he has disappeared. He was last seen on the day of their daughter's funeral. What really happened that day at the river? Where is Maggie's husband? And why can't she shake the suspicion that somewhere, somehow, her daughter is still alive?

Oh, to be a Beloved - one of those lucky people for whom nothing ever goes wrong. Everything falls into their laps without effort: happiness, beauty, good fortune, allure. Betty Stash is not a Beloved - but her little sister, the delightful Gloria, is. She's the one with the golden curls and sunny disposition and captivating smile, the one whose best friend used to be Betty's, the one whose husband should have been Betty's. Then, to everyone's surprise, Gloria inherits the family mansion. Losing what Betty considers her rightful inheritance is the final indignity.

Ran McGhie's world has been turned upside down. A young, lonely and frustrated writer, and suffering from mental health problems, he discovers that his long-dead mother was related to one of Glasgow's oldest merchant families. Not only that, but Ran has inherited Newton Hall, a vast mansion that belonged to his great-uncle, who appears to have been watching from afar as his estranged great-nephew has grown up.

For several years, time and circumstance have managed to separate Hallie Knight and her old friend Susan Trench. But when Susan disappears from her grandfather's seaside home on historic Topsail Island, it is Hallie whom Nicholas Trench calls for help. Wealthy, ill, and irascible, he refuses to believe that his beloved granddaughter and the heir to his fortune has been lost to him.

On the family homestead where she grew up, Martha Mary saw ghosts. As a young woman, she hopes to distance herself from those spirits by escaping to an inland college town. There she is absorbed by a budding romance, relieved by separation from an unstable sister, and disinterested in the flyers seeking information about a young woman who has disappeared - until one Indian summer afternoon when the missing woman appears beneath Martha’s apartment window, wearing a winter coat, her hair coated with ice.

Lucas Paige, a floundering middle-aged historian, reluctantly sits down with the woman he suspects was responsible for his father’s murder decades before. As they drink, they open up about this seminal event and he discovers much of what he thought to be true is anything but.

Karen married Alan after a whirlwind courtship and returned with him to the cliffside house next to the lighthouse he tended. She believed she was his first wife, not knowing of the macabre death his first wife had suffered. Then she began to hear strange rumors about the house, and about her husband. The truth lay hidden behind a locked door, and in a scrap of rose point lace. A novel by Victor Banis, author of nearly 200 novels and too many short stories to count.

When Nora, a withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy. Years later, the two reconnect in New York and begin a heated affair. Propelled by disorienting desire, Nora quickly becomes entangled in Nicola’s insular, menacing world of old-world luxury and family secrets.

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.

Ava grew up in a haunted mansion, envied by all her friends. But when her mother died mysteriously there, the thrills of Blackworth Mansion became nightmares. Ava never accepted that her mother perished from natural causes, but no one would believe her. Seventeen years later, Ava returns home to unravel the truth of her mother’s death—and her own demons quickly follow. Her estranged and vindictive father may be stalking her. Her secretive new sister-in-law lands on her doorstep with troubles of her own. And then there’s the strange girl who may or may not be haunting the grounds.

Twenty years ago, three young women disappeared, never to be found. The rumour to this day is that their bodies are still hidden deep within the murky Loch Aven. When Eleanor, Clio and Michaela find themselves rained out of a camping trip in the Scottish countryside, they have no option but to book the mysterious house nestled on the banks of the lake. But little do they know that history has a way of repeating itself. As secrets in the tightknit community begin to surface, and Michaela suddenly disappears, it becomes clear that something sinister is at play.

Er kennt deine tiefsten Kindheitsängste. Ein rätselhafter Patient zieht den jungen Psychiater Parker H. in seinen Bann. Seit dem sechsten Lebensjahr wird der mittlerweile 30-jährige Mann, den alle nur "Joe" nennen, in der düsteren Nervenheilanstalt in Neuengland verwahrt. Er gilt als nicht therapierbar. Jeder, der mit ihm spricht, verliert den Verstand oder begeht Selbstmord. Allen Warnungen zum Trotz beschließt der ehrgeizige Parker, "Joe" in seiner Zelle zu besuchen.

Joanna Flynn was lucky to be alive. But when the doctors told her she would suffer no lasting effects from the near-fatal accident, they were wrong. For that night the nightmares about Caroline began. As the dreams become more torturous, Joanna sets out to investigate this mysterious woman - a journey that takes her 3,000 miles from home to a picturesque town where everybody seems to have a conflicting opinion of the woman who haunts her dreams.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Zodiac by Sam Wilson, read by John Chancer. Every murder is a sign. In a society divided along Zodiac lines, status is cast at birth - and binding for life. Who you are can be determined by a matter of days, hours, even minutes. Even for the most experienced detectives, every once in a while a murder can shake them to the core. Like when the Chief of Police is killed in his own home.

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.

It is 1993 and Thomas Penmarsh has lived in Finisterre, the house by the sea, all his life, sleeping each night in the room with the barred window. He's only 48 but has been an old man since one evening in 1967 when he lost everything he valued. However, now his controlling mother has died and he is master of the house. When Esmond, his cousin and childhood confidant, comes to live with him, Thomas is overjoyed - Esmond always looks after him. But is Esmond all that he seems?

After an acclaimed career in ceramics making things and breaking things, it is now Jay herself who has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband, Simon, move to the desolate edges of the Yorkshire moors, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling Victorian property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely.