Vermont, 1950. There’s a place for the girls whom no one wants—the troublemakers, the illegitimate, the ones too smart for their own good. It’s called Idlewild Hall, and local legend says the boarding school is haunted. Four roommates bond over their whispered fears, their friendship blossoming—until one of them mysteriously disappears….
Vermont, 2014. Twenty years ago, journalist Fiona Sheridan’s elder sister’s body was found in the overgrown fields near the ruins of Idlewild Hall. And although her sister’s boyfriend was tried and convicted of the murder, Fiona can’t stop revisiting the events, unable to shake the feeling that something was never right about the case.
When Fiona discovers that Idlewild Hall is being restored by an anonymous benefactor, she decides to write a story about it. But a shocking discovery during renovations links the loss of her sister to secrets that were meant to stay hidden in the past—and a voice that won’t be silenced….
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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.
