If you’re looking for a book with hidden secrets and a creepy old house, The Ivy Tree definitely hits that sweet spot. The set-up will definitely catch one’s attention. Mary Grey has travelled from Canada to Northumberland, and while enjoying a day outing to Hadrian’s Wall, she gets accosted in the middle of nowhere by a brooding…
Kelley Armstrong is primarily known as a writer of thrillers and suspense novels, so a timeslip paranormal with a distinctly gothic-y feel about it is something of a departure for her. A Stitch in Time set in and around an old manor house on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, is an entertaining mash-up of time-travel and…
COVID-19 has made us more aware than ever of the importance of the spaces we call our own. That makes this the perfect moment to read the uncanny, absorbing Mexican Gothic, a tale about the kind of location in which you most definitely wouldn’t want to shelter in place. Wealthy socialite Noemí Taboada had planned…
Completely addictive, riveting, and engaging, The Sun Down Motel is the latest supernatural thriller from Simone St. James. A dual timeline tale of two women thirty-five years apart looking for answers to a series of disappearances, it contains the eerie, haunted tone I expect from this author’s work together with an excellent, engrossing mystery which…
Please note that this review was originally published in October 2018 upon the UK publication of this novel. The book’s original title is The Corset. Laura Purcell first came to my attention as the author of a couple of very fine pieces of historical fiction, and earlier this year, I awarded her fabulous, spooky supernatural/gothic…
Dorothy Eden’s Lady of Mallow was originally published in 1960, and has recently been digitally reissued, as have several of the author’s other books. London is abuzz with gossip about Lord Blane Mallow, who ran away from his Kentish home aged sixteen and hasn’t been seen or heard of in the twenty years since. Following…
I first picked up Jamaica Inn when I was fifteen, and it’s remained on my favorites shelf ever since. Certain parts of it haven’t aged well, but I read it again recently and still felt a claustrophobia and growing dread even though I knew what would happen next. In 1820, Mary Yellan’s dying mother, long…
Laura Purcell first came to my attention as the author of a couple of very fine pieces of historical fiction, and earlier this year, I awarded her fabulous, spooky supernatural/gothic mystery The Silent Companions DIK status and gushed about it to everyone who crossed my path! I’ve been waiting eagerly to read her next novel…
Laura Purcell is the author of two excellent pieces of historical fiction set in Georgian England, one, Queen of Bedlam, about Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, and the other, Mistress of the Court, a fictionalised account of the life of Henrietta Howard, who became the mistress of Prince George (later King George II)….
Anyone on the lookout for a slow-paced book where the heroine does a lot of wondering and pondering, have I got a recommendation for you. Unfortunately Phyllis A. Whitney’s Domino contains plenty of just that – and so didn’t work for me, which was disappointing because the setting is beautifully evoked. If only the rest…