Oxford student Jillian Leigh works day and night to keep up with her studies—so to leave at the beginning of the term is next to impossible. But after her uncle Toby, a renowned ghost hunter, is killed in a fall off a cliff, she must drive to the seaside village of Rothewell to pack up his belongings.
Almost immediately, unsettling incidents—a book left in a cold stove, a gate swinging open on its own—escalate into terrifying events that convince Jillian an angry spirit is trying to enter the house. Is it Walking John, the two-hundred-year-old ghost who haunts Blood Moon Bay? And who beside the ghost is roaming the local woods at night? If Toby uncovered something sinister, was his death no accident?
The arrival of handsome Scotland Yard inspector Drew Merriken, a former RAF pilot with mysteries of his own, leaves Jillian with more questions than answers—and with the added complication of a powerful, mutual attraction. Even as she suspects someone will do anything to hide the truth, she begins to discover spine-chilling secrets that lie deep within Rothewell…and at the very heart of who she is.
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Combining eerie supernatural hauntings with intricate murder mysteries, contemporary and historical suspense novels have found a distinct voice in chilling paranormal thrillers like The Sun Down Motel and The Broken Girls. Canadian author Simone St. James crafts stories centered around mysterious deaths, haunted locations, and persistent investigators. Her books blend creepy atmospheric tension with crime investigations to deliver propulsive narratives about long-buried secrets.
Simone St. James wrote her first ghost story, which was set in a haunted library, while attending high school. She spent twenty years working behind the scenes in the television business before deciding in her thirties to pursue a professional career in fiction writing. Her debut novel, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, achieved widespread recognition, earning two RITA Awards from the Romance Writers of America as well as an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. Following the success of her debut and her subsequent novel An Inquiry Into Love and Death, St. James left television to write full-time. She became a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author with her multi-timeline mystery thrillers and lives just outside Toronto, Canada, with her husband and a rescue cat.
Inspired by a desire to read ghost stories that were eerie and unsettling without being excessively gory, St. James began crafting fiction centered on the spooky possibilities of the supernatural. Her early novels focused on historical mysteries, frequently set in post-World War I England, while her later works incorporate modern dual timelines, true-crime elements, and sinister roadside settings like remote motels and highways. Recurring themes across her writing include cold case investigations, female solidarity, lingering hauntings, boarding school secrets, and ghost stories where the spirits are inextricably tied to unpunished crimes.
