The Darkness Surrounds Us
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“An early-autumn treat fit for late-night devouring.” —Publishers Weekly
“A taut gothic mystery with an intriguing twist.” —Susanna Calkins, award-winning author of the Lucy Campion Mysteries and the Speakeasy Murders
A Ghostly Window Into the Past
Nurse Nellie Lester can’t escape death. Fleeing Chicago at the height of the 1918 Spanish flu, she takes a nursing job at a decrepit mansion on a desolate Michigan island. She’s convinced the island holds the secret to her mother’s murky past. The only problem? Her dead mother seems to have followed her there. Nightly she’s haunted by a ghostly presence that appears in her bedroom. But is it her mother or something more sinister?
When the frozen body of the prior nurse is unearthed, Nellie suspects her family’s history and the nurse’s uncanny death are connected to a mysterious group that disappeared from the island twenty-four years earlier.
As winter closes in, past and present collide resurrecting a lurid killer, hell-bent on keeping the island’s secrets. Will Nellie uncover her mother’s shocking past before the killer enacts his final revenge?
“Lukasik blends all the elements needed for a dark suspense novel: a forbidding mansion, ghostly presences, secret passages, a hostile housekeeper, a temperamental employer, and residents unwilling to talk to outsiders. For fans of Rebecca, The Woman in White, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway.” —Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lukasik (White Like Her) delivers a gripping ghost story of pandemics past in this well-crafted gothic mystery. During the 1918 flu epidemic, nurse Nellie Lester leaves her work in a Chicago contagion ward to care for the wife of a logger baron in a mansion on a Lake Michigan island that—based on an old photograph—she suspects may harbor secrets her late mother kept from her, including her father's identity. Once there, Nellie is haunted by frequent visions of her mother's ghost in the small turret bedroom she stays in, while the library offers hints that her parents were part of the mysterious community that built up and then abruptly abandoned the island two decades earlier. When the body of the mansion's previous nurse turns up in the woods, Nellie attempts to investigate her death, but locals become increasingly angry about a stranger poking her nose into their business. Readers will sympathize with Nellie's fears and frustrations, and Lukasik maintains a deliciously dark tension throughout. With unpredictable plotting and superior atmospherics, this is an early-autumn treat fit for late-night devouring.
