Gothic Psychological Suspense

After a tragic accident she can’t quite remember, forty-something-year-old beloved Hollywood actress Annette Taylor finds herself bound to a wheelchair with several injuries. Living in Crawford Manor, the Gothic Hollywood mansion from the film that made her famous, has become too much for her to handle alone, so she must rely on her estranged child star sister, Sophia, to help take care of her. Shortly after a serial killer targeting actresses emerges, the sisters agree to be filmed in the house together for renowned producer and director Frank Baxter’s new documentary about their life.

Agnes Corey, a junior editor at a small independent publisher, has been hired by enigmatic author Veronica St. Clair to transcribe the sequel to her 1993 hit phenomenon, The Secret of Wyldcliffe Heights. St. Clair has been a recluse since the publication of the Jane Eyre-esque book, which coincided with a terrible fire that blinded and scarred her. Arriving in the Hudson Valley at St. Clair’s crumbling estate, which was once a psychiatric hospital for “wayward women,” Agnes is eager to ensure St. Clair’s devoted fans will get the sequel they’ve been anticipating for the past thirty years.

On Christmas Eve, 85-year-old Miriam Caravasios steps onto the ice that surrounds her seaside estate on Maine's Mount Desert Island. As a younger woman, she used to steal out on winter nights to meet her lover, walking across the frozen reach to their secret meeting place. She knows the way—but not the year. Miriam, her mind clouded by dementia, doesn’t hear the snap of thin ice until it’s too late.

Investigative journalist Susan "Stripe" McLachlan is constantly hounded by eager documentarians for interview requests about the Night Scrawler murders. One of the victims of the mysterious serial killer was a member of her own family: her father. At the peak of her career, her services are sought by Isaac Payne, who commissions her to write an article for his website. As she learns more about Isaac, Stripe digs up fresh secrets about the murders, arousing her suspicions. After an awkward confrontation, she wakes up in Isaac’s bed — with a chain around her ankle.

Ein altes Herrenhaus im Moor, ein grausamer Mord, ein einsames Mädchen. Suffolk, 1913: Hinter dem düsteren und einsam im Moor gelegenen Wake's End findet man den Hausherren Edmund Stearne neben einer grauenvoll zugerichteten Leiche. Er spricht nur diese einzigen Worte: "Ich war es, aber ich habe nichts falsch gemacht." Seine Tochter Maud ist ein einsames Mädchen, das ohne Mutter aufwächst und unter dem herrischen und lieblosen Vater leidet. Zu dem fürchterlichen Verbrechen schweigt sie beharrlich.

Ella Thompson, a geotechnical engineer, arrives in Wirrapara expecting dust, silence, and an abandoned mine site. What she finds is static—on the radio, in the mirrors, and behind her own reflection. Her dog, Casper, senses it first. Then the motel room shifts. The town watches. And memory itself begins to rot. As reality fractures, Ella is pulled into a spiral of echoes, teeth, and voices that don’t belong to her. The town doesn’t want to kill her. It wants to keep her. Shape her. Speak through her.

When she was just fourteen, Jill’s family moved to Walney Island. Initially intoxicated by the freedom of the seaside setting—and fifteen-year-old Andrew Brownstone—she came to learn that her first impressions were very wrong. After making a shocking discovery in Seaview House, Jill fled the scene—a guilty secret she’s carried with her ever since. Now, thirty years later, when the decrepit Seaview House is being demolished, a body is found buried in the garden. But who is the deceased?

Lisa dreamed of being a model. Between the reality of her crappy diner job and the rejection of her parents, her early 20s weren’t going the way she had envisioned. It was time she took her life back. But dark clouds were on the horizon. Upon meeting a mysterious young millionaire who would help her achieve her dreams, Lisa would soon discover that love and fame weren’t the only consequences of tangoing in the underground. This story plunges into a dark world that is hidden behind fame and fortune.

Med school dropout Lena is desperate for a job, any job, to help her parents, who are approaching bankruptcy after her father was injured and laid off nearly simultaneously. So when she is offered a position, against all odds, working for one of Boston’s most elite families, the illustrious and secretive Verdeaus, she knows she must accept—no matter how bizarre the interview or how vague the job description. By day, she is assistant to the family doctor and his charge—the sickly, poetic, drunken heir to the family empire, who is as difficult as his illness is mysterious.

Lucas Paige, a floundering middle-aged historian, reluctantly sits down with the woman he suspects was responsible for his father’s murder decades before. As they drink, they open up about this seminal event and he discovers much of what he thought to be true is anything but.

Lisa needs to disappear. And her friend's rambling old home in the wilds of Yorkshire seems like the perfect place. It's miles away from the closest town, and no one there knows her or her little boy, Joe. But when Lisa meets some of the locals and hears some disturbing rumours about the house, she realises it might not be the sanctuary she thought. What secret has Rowan Isle House - and her friend - kept hidden all these years? And what will Lisa have to do to survive when her own past finally catches up with her?

Aspiring author Graye Templeton will do anything to escape the horrific childhood crime that haunts her. After a life lived in shadows, she’s accepted a new job as protégé to Laura West, influential book blogger and wife of an acclaimed novelist. Laura’s connections could make Graye’s publishing dreams a reality. But there’s more to Laura than meets the eye. Behind the veneer of a charmed life, Laura’s marriage is collapsing. Her once-lauded husband is descending into alcoholism and ruin and bringing Laura nearer to the edge.

Donna Weaver has put everything she has into restoring The Breakers, an old bed and breakfast on a remote stretch of beach in Galloway. Now it sits waiting - freshly painted, richly furnished, filled with flowers - for the first guests to arrive. But Donna's guests, a contentious group of estranged cousins, soon realize that they've been here before, years ago. Decades have passed, but that night still haunts them: a 16th birthday party that started with peach schnapps and ended with a girl walking into the sea.

Former teen star Liv Hendricks quit acting after her younger sister disappeared following a Hollywood party gone wrong. Liv barely escaped with her life. But all this time, someone's been waiting patiently to finish what was started.... Now 15 years later, Liv is forced to return to the spotlight. She crowdfunds a webseries in which she'll pose as a real-life detective - a nod to the show she starred on as a teen. When a mysterious donor challenges her to look into a series of disappearances outside a town made famous by the horror movies filmed there, Liv has no choice but to accept.

Sixty seconds after she wakes from a coma, Maggie's world is torn apart. The police tell her that her daughter, Elspeth, is dead. That she drowned when the car Maggie had been driving plunged into the river. Maggie remembers nothing. When Maggie begs to see her husband, Sean, the police tell her that he has disappeared. He was last seen on the day of their daughter's funeral. What really happened that day at the river? Where is Maggie's husband? And why can't she shake the suspicion that somewhere, somehow, her daughter is still alive?

Oh, to be a Beloved - one of those lucky people for whom nothing ever goes wrong. Everything falls into their laps without effort: happiness, beauty, good fortune, allure. Betty Stash is not a Beloved - but her little sister, the delightful Gloria, is. She's the one with the golden curls and sunny disposition and captivating smile, the one whose best friend used to be Betty's, the one whose husband should have been Betty's. Then, to everyone's surprise, Gloria inherits the family mansion. Losing what Betty considers her rightful inheritance is the final indignity.

Ran McGhie's world has been turned upside down. A young, lonely and frustrated writer, and suffering from mental health problems, he discovers that his long-dead mother was related to one of Glasgow's oldest merchant families. Not only that, but Ran has inherited Newton Hall, a vast mansion that belonged to his great-uncle, who appears to have been watching from afar as his estranged great-nephew has grown up.

For several years, time and circumstance have managed to separate Hallie Knight and her old friend Susan Trench. But when Susan disappears from her grandfather's seaside home on historic Topsail Island, it is Hallie whom Nicholas Trench calls for help. Wealthy, ill, and irascible, he refuses to believe that his beloved granddaughter and the heir to his fortune has been lost to him.

On the family homestead where she grew up, Martha Mary saw ghosts. As a young woman, she hopes to distance herself from those spirits by escaping to an inland college town. There she is absorbed by a budding romance, relieved by separation from an unstable sister, and disinterested in the flyers seeking information about a young woman who has disappeared - until one Indian summer afternoon when the missing woman appears beneath Martha’s apartment window, wearing a winter coat, her hair coated with ice.

Karen married Alan after a whirlwind courtship and returned with him to the cliffside house next to the lighthouse he tended. She believed she was his first wife, not knowing of the macabre death his first wife had suffered. Then she began to hear strange rumors about the house, and about her husband. The truth lay hidden behind a locked door, and in a scrap of rose point lace. A novel by Victor Banis, author of nearly 200 novels and too many short stories to count.