Showing results by author "Shani Struthers" in All Categories

In 1899, in the North Yorkshire market town of Thorpe Morton, a tragedy occurred; 59 people died at the market hall whilst celebrating Christmas Eve, many of them children. One hundred years on and the spirits of the deceased are restless still, 'haunting' the community, refusing to let them forget. In 1999, psychic investigators Theo Lawson and Ness Patterson are called in to help, sensing immediately on arrival how weighed down the town is. Quickly they discover there's no safe haven. The past taints everything.

It's 1974, and four students—Tom, Danny, JoJo, and Lara—move into a grand but decaying country residence near their university, attracted by its low rent. Whilst none of them love the place, Tom is the most unsettled. From the moment he enters the property, called Beulah, he imagines being alone there, engulfed by its shadows. On the run up to their first Christmas, JoJo finds a Ouija board, and they decide to use it—encouraged by Danny's drugs. In the midst of the game, Tom makes contact with something, possibly the spirit for which the house is named.

Ruby Davis runs Psychic Surveys, a high street company specializing in domestic spiritual clearance. Having inherited her ability to see beyond the veil that separates this world and the next from her mother Jessica, she is busy helping grounded spirits to cross the great divide. In turn, Jessica inherited her gift from her mother Sarah, and Sarah from Rosamund.

Eleven stories chronicle the life and times of characters who cross paths and share destiny’s fire escape. Ghosts, gravity, romance, and secrets weave the communal narrative. Step into the elevator. Push any button, but try to remember your way back out. Not everybody makes it.

Jessica Lockhart is in need of a live-in carer over the Christmas period; Isla Barrow is the woman who takes the job. After a fraught journey to reach her along remote country lanes, Isla arrives to find the old woman in distress, and the house strangely unnerving. With the weather hostile, no phone line or mobile signal, and her charge growing increasingly frail, Isla realizes death is waiting. And something else besides: vengeance.

Devastated by the deaths of her parents and disillusioned with life, Caroline Daynes is in America trying to connect with their memory. Travelling to her mother's hometown of Williamsfield in Pennsylvania, she is caught in a snowstorm and forced to stop at The Egress hotel - somewhere she'd planned to visit as her parents honeymooned there. From the moment she sets foot inside the lobby and meets the surly receptionist, she realizes this is a hotel like no other. Charming and unique, it seems lost in time with a whole cast of compelling characters sheltering behind closed doors.

When you look in the mirror, who do you see? With Mandy the haunted doll now safely ensconced in Mason Town Museum, sealed in a glass case, Shady Groves and her colleagues, Annie and Ray, can relax. After a fashion. The small-town museum they run is not like others, it’s a place that seeks to contain and understand artifacts and relics charged with negative energy. Their aim is to gradually reduce how potent that energy can be, and the destruction it can lead to. All is well, until Shady chances upon a mirror in a thrift store. The reflection staring back at her is not quite her own.

Lucy Klein, 42, is not only obsessed with Highgate, she works there too, organising tours for those with an interest in some of the finest Victorian funerary architecture in existence. Single, and on the shy side, she is nonetheless content with her life, or so she thinks. When she meets the enigmatic Zak Harborne, she realizes what she’s been missing and quickly falls in love. Suddenly, it is the business of living that interests her.

Jessamin Wade's husband is dead. She keeps him alive in her imagination, but she thinks she will hear him better if she goes somewhere quieter. Her destination is Glenelk in the Highlands of Scotland. Quickly, she meets the locals: her landlord, Fionnlagh Maccaillin; Maggie, who runs the village shop; and Stan, a frail, old man stricken with grief. Their lives entwining in mysterious ways, can they help each other to move on, or will they always belong to the ghosts that haunt them?

Kenna Jackson is stressed. London is sucking the life out of her, and there’s no way to escape the rat race. When an opportunity presents itself out of the blue, she decides to take it. After all, it’s change she craves. Drumlin Castle has stood for 10 centuries and no doubt will stand for 10 more. Set in the heart of the Aberdeenshire countryside, it’s witnessed the best of life…and the worst. Not much is known of Rohaise, who once lived there, only that she was a fiery redhead, the mistress of the Laird, and that she lost her life defending both him and the castle.

On a road trip to Baker City and the mountains of Oregon, Shady Groves, Ray Bartlett and their friends are looking forward to a few days’ vacation. On the way, they make an unscheduled motel stop where Shady encounters Missy Davenport, the proprietor, an old photograph of Missy too, and her family, horror attached to it.

Beth Williams leads a lonely existence, going to work, then returning to her flat to watch TV, eat, and sleep – the same routine on repeat, day after day. It’s a loneliness she nurtures, finds comfort in, even, except at Christmas, a time of dread. Then comes an invite, an offer from an old friend, to join him for "The Damned Season" at his house on an island off the coast of Anglesey, for Christmas with a difference. Intrigued as well as desperate, Beth accepts, arriving there a few days before Christmas Eve.

1999: In the small town of Rutherford, Kansas, four teenagers work the night shift in a local store for the summer. Three are loners. One is new in town. Together they’re a perfect fit. 2010: Tupper, the owner of the store and a pillar of the community, dies. Of the night shift, only three return to their hometown for his funeral.

An extreme land breeds extreme emotions. Comraich - Gaelic for Sanctuary - that's what this ancient fortress of a house in the Highlands of Scotland has offered its generations, a haven from the world beyond. The nesting instinct kicking in, a pregnant Jessamin decides that Comraich, which she shares with her partner Fionnlagh Maccaillin, needs refreshing. Getting to work in one of the spare bedrooms she makes a startling discovery, one that pulls her into a world of the intense and disturbing passions of others that have been here before.

After Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere – his betrayal – Morgan leaves Caer Arthur behind, bound for the mist-shrouded isle of Avalon. There, she hopes to find the mother she has never known: Viviane, the High Priestess. Having barely survived the crossing, she fears not only for her life, but for the child she carries – Mordred. Avalon is said to be a sanctuary, an ancient bastion of the Goddess in a land fast falling to the One True God. Yet peace eludes her as a hunger for power stirs.