Gothic Historical Fiction

Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands - a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver - a true comedy of errors ensues.

Newly appointed as land agent to the youthful Lord Croft, Matthew Rowsley finds plenty to keep him busy as he attends to his lordship's neglected country estate. But he's distracted from his tasks by the disappearance of a young housemaid. Has Maggie really eloped with a young man, as her mother attests - or is the truth rather more sinister? What's been going on behind the scenes at the grand country estate...and where has his lordship disappeared to?

1855, New Hampshire. Lucy Blunt is set to hang for a double murder. Murderess or victim? Only Lucy knows the truth. In the shadow of the gallows, Lucy reflects on the events that led to her bitter downfall - from the moment she arrived at the rambling Burton mansion looking for work and a better life to the grisly murders themselves.

In a sleepy, little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family’s salvation - or its downfall.

Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science - something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter.

Isoline Beresford has beautiful yet haunting dreams. In them, a man she doesn't know is calling to her. She's inexplicably, inexorably drawn to him, until he's more real to her than her own fiancé. When she calls off her engagement, her enraged father sends her to live with her 90-year-old grand-aunt, the Dowager Countess Bellamira Granville. If she won't do her duty at home, he reasons, perhaps she can at least convince Lady Granville to leave her fortune to Isoline. But life at Thornrush Manor is not what Isoline expected. Her aunt is as spry and elegant as a woman half her age.

Photographer Septimus Blackwood is on a quest to rebuild and rise up of the ashes of his own ambitions. He encounters many unforeseen obstacles, including the mysterious inhabitants of a long abandoned theater, a nefarious foe, and an elusive nocturnal gang. As the luminescence of gas lamps stretches across a dark city, a power struggle ensues. Among the mayhem is Rick Best, a reporter turned detective with an obsession to track down one of London’s most notorious villains, Spring-Heeled Jack. The Movement of Light will linger long in the shadows of your mind.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book that changed the world. Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and a movie starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley, Monster is a brilliant fictionalized biography akin to The Other Boleyn Girl. Two centuries ago this year, the young woman who invented science fiction was only 20 when she wrote the book that became Frankenstein. Mary Shelley said, “People ask how I, then a young girl, could think of, and dilate upon, so hideous subject?”

When famed poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned postmortem photographer, is charged with a simple task: transport Hugh’s remains for burial in a chapel that has been locked and abandoned for 16 years, housing the remains of his beloved wife, Ada. However, Ada’s grief-stricken niece refuses to open the chapel for Robert unless he agrees to her bargain: Before he can lay Hugh to rest, Robert must record Isabelle’s story of Ada and Hugh’s ill-fated marriage over the course of five nights.

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.

A mysterious woman pleads for the help of Inspectors Frey and 'Nine-Nails' McGray. Her son, illegitimate scion of the Koloman family, has received an anonymous death threat - right after learning he is to inherit the best part of a vast wine-producing estate. In exchange for their protection, she offers McGray the ultimate cure for his sister, who has been locked in an insane asylum after brutally murdering their parents: the miraculous waters that spring in a small island in the remote Loch Maree.

Diana Cooke was "born with the century" and came of age just after World War I. The daughter of Virginia gentry, she knew early that her parents had only one asset, besides her famous beauty: their stately house, Saratoga, the largest in the commonwealth, which has hosted the crème of society and Hollywood royalty. Though they are land-rich, the Cookes do not have the means to sustain the estate. Without a wealthy husband, Diana will lose the mansion that has been the heart and soul of her family for five generations.

Boston, 1870. Photographer Edward Moody runs a booming business capturing the images of the spirits of the departed in his portraits. He lures grieving widows and mourning mothers into his studio with promises of catching the ghosts of their deceased loved ones with his camera. Despite the whispers around town that Moody is a fraud of the basest kind, no one has been able to expose him, and word of his gift has spread, earning him money, fame, and a growing list of illustrious clients.

The Man Behind the Glass is based around a character called Septimus Blackwood, a Victorian photographer with a difference. The tale is set in London’s East End in the year 1860. A mysterious Gothic adventure of a man’s quest to capture life and cheat death through photography. Septimus races against time to discover his family’s long lost legacy buried deep among the forgotten rivers and cellars of old London. Unbeknownst to him a mysterious old woman looks on....

Welcome to 1830s Bermondsey, London's most notorious slum, a land of gang wars, freak shows, and home to every depravity known to man. Dr. Thomas Grant, a disgraced physician, adopts Wynfield, a ten-year-old thief savagely battered by a gang leader for insubordination. The boy grows up to be a slender, idealistic opium addict who worships Victor Hugo. Wynfield senses that he has a purpose outside of his rat-infested kingdom, but he never guesses that he had been selected at birth to topple the British aristocracy.

1793: Having escaped the Reign of Terror, Emilie Maigny took refuge in England, trying to come to grips with the life and loss she left behind. When her brother, Sinjon, returns, a terrifying evil swoops down upon her. Nightmares plague her now, providing strange clues...but to what?

Those in line to the Malenfer estate are succumbing to terrible ends - is a supernatural legacy at work, or something entirely more human? Young Irish mercenary Dermot Ward retreats to Paris at the close of World War I where he drinks to forget his experiences, especially the death of his comrade, Arthur Malenfer. But Arthur has not forgotten Dermot.

Mandy's brother Ned is in trouble. He has been accused of murdering the woman who had been clearly trying to seduce him. Their guardian, the Duke of Margate, is summoned to help. Mandy had always assumed he was an old man. But, the duke was far from old. He was, in fact, virile, dashing, and oh so good looking. The duke enjoyed being a confirmed bachelor…and then he met Mandy. But, first things first - they had to prove Ned innocent.

The year is 1928. Kate Moore is looking for a way out of the poverty and violence of her childhood. When a chance encounter on a transatlantic ocean liner brings her face-to-face with the handsome heir to a Chicago fortune, she thinks she may have found her escape - as long as she can keep her past concealed.

Miss Eleanor Sheffield is a talented evaluator of antiquities, but with her father's passing and her uncle's decline into dementia, the family business is at risk. In the Victorian era, unmarried Eleanor cannot run Sheffield Brothers alone. The death of a longtime client, Baron Lydney, offers an unexpected complication when Eleanor is appointed the temporary trustee of the baron's legendary collection. She must choose whether to donate the priceless treasures to a museum or allow them to pass to the baron's only living son, Harry - the man who broke Eleanor's heart.