Gothic Historical Fiction

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?

Laura and Monique were cousins and, in childhood, had been as close as twins. So when Monique's husband, the Comte de Montigny, came to Laura and asked her to impersonate Monique in order to protect Monique's child, she agreed. His story of Monique's disappearance and suicide, however, did not sound like the actions of the cousin Laura had known, and the rest of Monique's family reacted with odd hostility to "Monique's" reappearance...She feared that Monique had been murdered - and that she would be next.

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.

London, 1888: Susannah rushes into marriage to a young and wealthy surgeon. After a passionate honeymoon, she returns home with her new husband wrapped around her little finger. But then everything changes. Thomas' behaviour becomes increasingly volatile and violent. He stays out all night, returning home bloodied and full of secrets. The gentle caresses she enjoyed on her wedding night are now just a honeyed memory.

New Hampshire, 1865. Marion Abbott is summoned to Brawders House asylum to collect the body of her sister, Alice. She’d been found dead after falling four stories from a steep-pitched roof. Officially: an accident. Confidentially: suicide. But Marion believes a third option: murder. Returning to her family home to stay with her brother and his second wife, the recently widowed Marion is expected to quiet her feelings of guilt and grief. Just when the search for the truth seems hopeless, a stranger approaches Marion with chilling words: I saw her fall.

Paris, 1810. Haunted by the French Revolution, Marie Tussaud has locked herself away in her shop with the death masks she was forced to make to avoid the guillotine. Philidor, a famous magician, offers her the chance to accompany him to London to assist in creating a wax automaton that will bring them both money and success. Following a disastrous performance on their opening night in which the wax on their prized spectacle melts, the eccentric duke, William Cavendish, invites them to his rambling estate, Welbeck.

The patriarch of the Licht family, Abraham has raised a brood of talented con artists, children molded in his image, and experts in The Game, his calling and philosophy of life. Traveling from one small town to the next across the continent, from the Northeast to the frontier West, they skillfully swindle unsuspecting victims, playing on their greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness. Despite their success, Abraham cannot banish a past that haunts him: the ghost of his ancestor Sarah Licht, a former con woman who met with a gruesome fate.