Showing results for "Gothic" in Small Town & Rural

Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past. But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom soon finds himself unable to resist.

A glimpse of eight-year-old Ivor in a pretty market town inspires young artist Gemma Palmer to write and illustrate a children’s book. Gemma next meets Ivor when she is 29 and he 16. They become lovers, to the consternation of Gemma’s friends…for the real Ivor is quite different from the sunny character she turned him into in her much-loved books. Lurking in the secret places of his heart are impulses that are dangerous and malign. It can only be a matter of time before they are released, ready to strike. But when? Where? At whom?

Kier Sealgair is the only daughter of a family of seal hunters. Her brothers continue the family trade but the seal hunters and fishermen of the small town are struggling as catches decline and the seals are dying. Kier cannot kill and in hard times she is a burden to her family, especially now that her father is ailing. Her only friend is Fie, son of the town's tailor, living with the knowledge that his father hoped for a daughter. Near the town, high on the cliffs, is Erskine Manor. Servants come from the manor to the town to buy supplies but the family is never seen and rumours abound.

Shipwrecks are part of life in the remote village of Porthmorvoren, Cornwall. And as the sea washes the bodies of the drowned onto the beach, it also brings treasures: barrels of liquor, exotic fruit, the chance to lift a fine pair of boots from a corpse, maybe even a jewel or two. When, after a fierce storm, Mary Blight rescues a man half dead from the sea, she ignores the whispers of her neighbours and carries him home to nurse better. Gideon Stone is a Methodist minister from Newlyn, a married man.

In 1977, in the small town of Claire Lake, two men were murdered with the same gun. Beth Greer was the prime suspect - a rich, eccentric 23-year-old woman, seen fleeing one of the crimes. Ever since her surprise acquittal, she's retreated to her mansion, Greer house, and never commented publicly on the case. 40 years later, Shea Collins is a receptionist by day, and a true crime blogger by night. When she meets Beth by chance, Shea asks her for an interview. To her surprise, Beth says yes. But when they meet in Beth's mansion, Shea immediately senses something isn't right.

1980s Appalachia. Sheila knows she needs to keep her appetites in check. Isolated and struggling in ramshackle poverty, her desires—for food, for escape, for the perfect girls in the pages of her pilfered magazines—are about the only things she can control. But with every passing day, life with her exhausted mother and her half-feral younger sister Angie feels more like a rope tightening around her neck. When a pair of hikers are brutally murdered on the trail, Sheila and Angie find themselves drawn inexorably into the hunt for the killer.

A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hard-boiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake. She introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.

The elite warriors of the Hereford-based SAS know all about pain and the enduring of it. Syd Spicer, ex-SAS trooper, has found himself back in the regiment - this time as its chaplain, responsible for the spiritual welfare of the hardest men in or out of uniform. Faced with a case which would normally be passed discreetly to Hereford diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins, Spicer is forced, for security reasons, to try and handle it himself - and is coming close to a breakdown.

Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the navy and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D. L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.

Perdido, 1928. Torn apart by the continuing tensions between Mary-Love and her daughter-in-law Elinor, the Caskey family must also confront other crises. As the economy plummets and relationships sour, something sinister is prowling the darkest recesses of the Caskey household. Patient, implacable, waiting to catch its next victim in its deadly web…

Intruder in the Dust is at once an engrossing murder mystery and an unflinching portrait of racial injustice. Set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, it is the story of Lucas Beauchamp, a black man wrongly arrested for the murder of Vinson Gowrie, a white man. Confronted by the threat of lynching, Lucas sets out to prove his innocence, aided by a white lawyer, Gavin Stephens, and his young nephew, Chick Mallison.

It's 1825, four generations after Berggrund Island's women stood accused of witchcraft under the eye of their priest, now long dead. In his place is Pastor Silas, a widower with two wild young daughters, Beata and Ulrika. The sisters are outcasts: imaginative, oppositional, increasingly obsessed with the lore and legend of the island's dark past and their absent mother, whom their father refuses to speak of. As the girls come of age, and the strictures of the community shift but never wane, their rebellions twist and sharpen

A veteran of the Great War, Jesse Cole is grateful for the quiet life he now leads. But when his closest friend runs afoul of local criminals Frog and Squirrel Fenley, Jesse is forced to spin his moral compass and enter a violent and volatile underworld. There he encounters corrupt lawmen, hired assassins, and a dark family secret that will upend all he once knew. Complicating matters are Texas Ranger Amon Atkins—who arrives to investigate the Fenleys just as their empire is threatened by a deadly new competitor—and the green-eyed, raven-haired Adaline, a love Jesse thought he’d lost forever.

The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Killgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme, and St Petroc offers him a chance to live a safe and quiet life. Until he meets Lila. Lila is a 17-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom's house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers' commune she's been living at.

Ember is a succubus, consuming in every sense. My theory is proven when I specifically ignore Ember for an entire month, yet her scent remains in my nostrils, the vision of her in my mind’s eye. Her peppery musk dances along the back of my tongue, ruining my taste for anyone else. Savannah Merricourt is labeled as my intended, and I should accept it, as I do everything, because my father’s too powerful and I’ve been locked in the basement too many times.

Austria-Hungary, 1909. From the moment Yuri Moroz sets out on an evening patrol of the Ukrainian village where he lives, he’s plunged into memories of the eerie circumstances that forced him to flee London and the priesthood to seek safety far from home.

In Perdido, Alabama, the Caskey family have endured; some face death whilst others welcome new life. Unexpected alliances have formed, bitter conflict divides former friends. Hardened by years of experience, Miriam, now head of the family business, is relentless in her pursuit of wealth. And when she makes a surprising discovery beneath their lands, it is not just the Caskey family that benefits, but the whole town. But will this sudden fortune be enough to lay to rest the ghosts of the past? And how long before nature comes to reclaim its debt?

Married couple Jack and Ali Gardiner move to a self-sufficient spiritual commune in the English Fens, desperate for fresh start. The local village is known for the witches who once resided there, and Rosalind House, where the commune has been established, is a former psychiatric home, with a disturbing history. When Jack and Ali arrive, a chain of unexpected and unexplained events is set off, and it becomes clear that they are not all that they seem. As the residents become twitchy, and the villagers suspicious, events from the past come back to haunt them, and someone is seeking retribution....

Welcome to gentle Juliana, where you can have it all…if you pay the price. The email that lands in Billie Hope’s inbox seems like a gift from the universe. For $100, she can purchase a spacious Victorian home in Juliana, Georgia, a small town eager to boost its economy in the wake of the pandemic. She can leave behind her New York City rental and the painful memories of shuttering her once thriving restaurant and start over. Plus, she’ll get a business grant to open a new restaurant in a charming riverside community laden with opportunity. It seems like a dream come true…or a devil’s bargain.

When you’ve already died, there should be nothing left to fear… When Adam Ramsdell pulls Elle’s half-frozen body from the surf on a lonely California beach, she has no memory of what her full name is and how she got those bruises ringing her throat.