Historical Psychological Thriller

"Whispers" marks the haunting debut of the Laurel House series by M. L. Bullock, a riveting journey into the eerie underbelly of southern gothic fiction. Unfolding in 1890, the tale centers around a young girl named Petal "Pettie" Sullivan, whose innocent exploration of her family's historic southern estate, Laurel House, takes a horrifying turn. Pettie, a curious and bright child, becomes fascinated by the strange whispers she hears emanating from the blooming peony garden. Despite her earnest reports to her parents, she's met with dismissive remarks and disbelief. Until one day, Pettie ...

Kate Lawrence can sense the shadow of violent death. In her struggle to cope with her unwelcome gift, she has frozen people out of her life. Her marriage is on the rocks, her career in chaos. So she decides to start again, joining her cousin Sylvia and partner Michael in their mission to restore Llys y Garn, an old mansion in deepest Pembrokeshire. The house and grounds are full of mysteries that only she can sense, but she is determined to face them - so determined that she fails to notice that ancient energies are not the only shadows threatening Llys y Garn....

London, 1944: As bombs start raining from the sky, two women rush out of a restaurant, leaving their possessions behind. Their chance meeting amid the chaos and destruction will have long-lasting consequences. Both beset by desperate problems, they take advantage of the wartime chaos to escape their humdrum lives and start again.

1916. The Russian Empire is crumbling under the weight of defeat in the World War I and the imminent Revolution. Irina Yakovleva is a 17-year-old girl of noble birth living in Moscow. She falls in love with a young and ambitious lawyer Nikolai Rakelov. They marry in the middle of the tumultuous 1917 right before the Bolshevik Revolution. A few months later, Nikolai is murdered by a group of four Bolshevik soldiers while Irina is left alive to be raped and later executed.

Living on her family’s gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure ...One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace.

Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House, an isolated manse in the English countryside, early in the very wet spring of 1950, to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart. Hart House is also inhabited by a perpetually disgruntled housekeeper and Major Clement Hart, Mrs. Hart's war-ravaged son, who is struggling to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. When a child's game goes violently awry in the woods surrounding Hart House, a great shadow - love, perhaps - descends upon its inhabitants.

Ex-GI Will Gardestang just wanted to go to college on the GI Bill and get on with his life. After a chance meeting, he befriends Tommy Gatchell and Rico Challoner, two young men who share his love for philosophical debate, and soon all three participate in an ESP experiment. After Will and Rico display apparent psychic abilities, Rico begins to become panicky and in short order is killed before their eyes, seemingly long distance by his superiors in a devil-worshipping cult. Enraged over the death of their friend, Will and Tommy vow to track down the killers and unmask their diabolic plans.

The action swings from London to Sweden, and then back into the past, to Franco’s Spain, as Roy and Castells hunt a monstrous killer...in the latest instalment of Johana Gustawsson’s award-winning series. Spain, 1938: the country is wracked by civil war, and as Valencia falls to Franco’s brutal dictatorship, Republican Therese witnesses the murders of her family. Captured and sent to the notorious Las Ventas women’s prison, Therese gives birth to a daughter who is forcibly taken from her.

When William D. Thomas’s wife dies in childbirth, he places an advertisement in his local newspaper seeking a nanny for his newborn child. He is thankful when an experienced nanny arrives at 43, Laurence Street, and takes over from his frazzled housekeeper Mrs McHugh. Mrs McHugh confides in her bedridden friend Betty, who has a bird’s-eye view of all the happenings on Laurence Street, that the nanny is not all she seems.

Back in London's swinging '60s, Steve Cook was teen idol number one. But that changed when a 16-year-old fan was found dead in his hotel room bed. Steve's career came to a crashing halt after he was dumped by his record company and arrested. Now, in 1978 San Francisco, Steve works construction, still dreaming of a comeback. Until his 11-year-old daughter is kidnapped. Colleen's search takes her through San Francisco's underbelly and all the way to '70s London, where she discovers a thread leading back to the death of a forgotten fan in Steve's hotel room.

This touching story is based on real events, it takes place in Ukraine during the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. At the center of the story is the beautiful Paraska, her loving husband Ostap, and the chairman of the collective farm Prokop, who lusts for Paraska. Can she take advantage of her beauty to save her children from starvation? Can she, still buried alive in a grave, rise from the dead?

Claude is stricken by tragedy, and all fingers point at the Gypsies as the nation divides, and an empire falls. He is the king's best man and has been given orders to rid France of all their problems. Amidst his role in a barbaric hunt and corrupt justice system, Claude finds himself drawn to a young girl of this minority race and consumes himself with her and his own ideas of who she should be for him.

On New Year’s Eve, 1972, a boat pulls up to the Maiden Rock lighthouse with relief for the keepers. But no one greets the boat. When the entrance door, locked from the inside, is battered down, rescuers find an empty tower. A table is laid for a meal not eaten. The Principal Keeper’s weather log describes a storm raging round the tower, but the skies have been clear all week. And the clocks have all stopped at 8:45. What strange fate befell the doomed men?

It's 1645. When Alice Hopkins' husband dies in a tragic accident, she returns to the small Essex town of Manningtree, where her brother Matthew still lives. But home is no longer a place of safety. Matthew has changed, and there are rumours spreading through the town: whispers of witchcraft, and of a great book, in which he is gathering women's names. To what lengths will Matthew's obsession drive him? And what choice will Alice make when she finds herself at the very heart of his plan?

In 1892 Paris, Julius Stewart painted The Baptism, a Vanderbilt family scene that contains an embarrassing secret. In the present day, art historian Grace Atwood becomes obsessed with the painting and its hidden clues for reasons that have more to do with her personal ghosts. Either her doting husband is trying to make her think she's crazy, or she really is in the early stages of dementia.

Schweden 1981: In einer forensischen Psychiatrie - nahe Stockholm - sitzt der gefährlichste Serienmörder seiner Zeit: KURT SENGE. Obwohl er insgesamt sechs Frauen tötete, bereut er bis heute nichts und legte nie ein Geständnis ab. Trotzdem löste dieser Mann einen wahren Tumult um seine Person aus, denn Kurt war jung, gutaussehend und charismatisch. Seit seinem Gerichtsprozess vor 17 Jahren, kennt ihn in Schweden jedes Kind. Noch heute erhält er täglich Post von liebeshungrigen Frauen und anderen Verehrern.

Adair Stanton grew up in the peaceful hamlet known as North Western. While she ran barefoot through wildflowers, her family ran a prosperous inn on the stagecoach route. As an adult with a child of her own, Adair is ready to take her place at the inn. One of the guests, a man named Robert Fawn, is convinced he’ll find gold in the Mohawk River that flows through North Western. Everyone believes him to be daft. Then one day, Robert Fawn vanishes. Adair is convinced someone has harmed him for the gold. But who in her hometown would be so sinister?

October 1914: the destroyer Svea emerged from the Stockholm archipelago bearing south-south-east. On board was Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a naval engineer charged with making depth soundings to find a navigable channel for the Swedish navy. As a child Tobiasson-Svartman was fascinated by measurement; nothing is as magical as exact knowledge.

Julian lives a charmed life in Los Angeles. Surrounded by friends, he is young, handsome, and runs a successful business. Everything changes after he has a fateful encounter with a mysterious young woman named Josephine. Julian's world is turned upside down by a love affair that takes him—and everyone else in his life—by storm. For the two new lovers, the City of Angels is transformed into a magical playground. But Josephine is not what she seems and carries secrets that threaten to tear them apart—seemingly forever.

Mary lives a contented life as wife to a wealthy merchant in Elizabethan London. But there's a part of her past she can't forget.... As a small girl she was cursed for causing the death of a vagrant child, a curse that predicts that she will hang. Sometimes the happiest households are not what they seem, and Mary's carefully curated world begins to falter. Mary's whole life is based on a lie. Is she the woman her husband believes her to be?