Sarah Rayne

“An inventively plotted, goose-bumps inducing ghost story.” —Booklist
 
A house with a sinister past—and a grisly power . . .
 
When Michael Flint is asked by American friends to look over an old Shropshire house they have unexpectedly inherited, he is reluctant to leave the quiet of his Oxford study. But when he sees Charect House, its uncanny echoes from the past...

The Poisoned Village. That's the grim nickname the locals have for Priors Bramley, emptied of its residents when a Cold War experiment with chemical weapons went badly wrong. But the nightmares in Priors Bramley have been festering a lot longer, going back to the long-abandoned Cadence Manor. What happened there in the years before the first world war? And what is the source of the eerie music drifting down the crumbling village streets?

"Having unexpectedly inherited an Elizabethan manor house in rural Norfolk, the new owner Quentin Rivers has asked Phineas Fox to investigate the house's history. Phin soon becomes immersed in The Tabor's dark and mysterious past, and in the course of his research uncovers tales of a curious dance, the Cwellan Daunsen: a dance that has not been performed for centuries but whose strange legend still lingers. The dance has a dark side; whenever it took...

"Another day, another grand scheme! The thieving Fitzglen family are back in this second instalment of the spellbinding Theatre of Thieves gothic mystery series set in Victorian England.London, 1908. The Fitzglens, one of London's leading theatre families and part-time thieves, are plotting their next scheme when they receive terrible news about Great Uncle Montague. He's been killed in a tragic accident at his Notting Hill home. Montague will be...

When Nell West starts extending her Oxford antiques shop, she is not expecting to uncover strange fragments of its past: fragments that include a frightened message scribbled on old plasterwork, dated 1850 and referring to someone called Thaisa. She also uncovers a mysterious link with a village on the Dorset coast - a village with an ancient bell tower and dark memories of a piece of music known locally as Thaisa's Song. The sea is gradually encroaching...

When Benedict Doyle finds himself the owner of his great-grandfather's north London house, he is dismayed. For it was in that house that a sinister darkness of his family's past was revealed. Through that darkness runs the grisly thread of an old legend about a chess set - 32 carved figures believed to possess a dark power, but shut away in the forgotten library of a tumbledown Irish castle for many decades. And when Nell West begins to compile an...

A long-ago crime continues to menace the present in this spine-chilling tale of supernatural suspense. When Michael Flint is asked by a colleague to investigate a reputedly haunted house, he is intrigued. Leo Rosendale's childhood was blighted by a macabre tragedy in the grim Deadlight Hall – a tragedy that occurred towards the end of World War II, involving a set of twins who vanished. The fate of Sophie and Susannah Reiss was never discovered,...

Phineas Fox finds it impossible to refuse when his sport-loving neighbor Toby begs for his help in finding out what's happened to his cousin Arabella, who seems to have disappeared without trace. The only clue to her whereabouts is an obscure 1940s' portrait left in her flat, a gift from her godfather, Stefan. The painting depicts the mysterious Christa Klein, Stefan's sister - and an alleged murderess. Was Christa Klein really guilty of a monstrous...