Shroud

A fraudulent medium. A house full of secrets. And a killer who can't let either of them leave.

Madame Theda is a fraud. She wears mourning clothes without having lost anyone. She owns a past that isn't hers. And she claims to speak to the dead, but can't.

When she is hired to investigate a haunting at the isolated Blackheath House on the English moors, she readily accepts. It might just secure her position as a rising medium in a Victorian London obsessed with the dead.

But Blackheath House, lonely and disdainful, like its owners, holds too many secrets.

Why do the servants flee the house each night? Did a devil's curse doom the family's men? Why are parts of the house sealed off from visitors?

As the house's labyrinthine corridors draw Theda deeper into a web of secrets and deceit, the boundary between reality and the supernatural begins to blur. Soon, her reputation is the least of what's at stake now. And the past she ran from isn't done with her yet.

This first instalment of the debut trilogy The Making of Madame Theda delivers atmospheric suspense and a gothic supernatural mystery for readers who love haunted-house stories such as Rebecca Netley's The Whistling or Laura Purcell's The Silent Companions.