An Inquiry into Love and Death
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A young woman searches for the truth behind her uncle’s mysterious death in a town haunted by a restless ghost in this gripping novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Cold Cases.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
St. James follows The Haunting of Maddy Clare with another chilling story best read in the dark. When her Uncle Toby dies suspiciously after falling from a cliff, Oxford student Jillian Leigh is sent to identify his body in the small English town of Rothewell. Strange things start happening almost at once the eerie scratching at a second-story window by phantom tree limbs; a book on ghost visitations found hidden in the stove. Toby, it turns out, had fashioned himself a ghost hunter and it appears that Rothewell attracted him for preternatural reasons. When Inspector Drew Merriken of Scotland Yard shows up, believing there's more to Toby's death than it appears, he drafts Jillian to help investigate the story of a local ghost who haunts Blood Moon Bay, soliciting advice from a neighboring family and various locals. St. James tells this story in two distinct moods: an immediate, campfire-appropriate tone that will heighten the pulse, and a ruminative mode to parse the mystery behind Toby's death and the ghost he was after. Overcoming a sometimes uneven narrative, St. James delivers a quickly paced read that will satisfy both new and old fans.
