Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

   (Next Chapter, 2025). ISBN: 979-8272238542 A few months ago, I reviewed the first book in this trilogy, What Happened at the Abbey , which I enjoyed for its vivid locales, Gothic tropes, and interesting characters.   Having received the complete trilogy in a single volume, I knew that the story’s heroine, Ingrid Barker—the self-styled widow of Winchester—would return to the formidable, Usheresque mansion in Straithbairn, in the Highlands of Scotland, although I had no clue as to how or why. Her time with the owners, the McCleods, for whom she served as housekeeper in What Happened at the Abbey , was anything but pleasant, and she left under multilayered, malignant circumstances. Book two opens with the return of Ingrid and her precocious preteen daughter for the funeral of the McCleod patriarch, which launches a set of mystery boxes into motion. Ingrid, being a fan of Sherlock Holmes ( Secrets… takes place in 1893; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has just killed off the wo...

  (New York: Shivering Pond Publishing, 2025). ISBN: 9781088146774 It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly four years since I reviewed E. Denise Billups’s Civil War/modern era ghost story Tainted Harvest . Since that time, the author has written two more books in the series and fourteen overall. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to read and review her latest. Similar to Tainted Harvest , this book, Beneath Beauford Grove , is also a ghost story, although with significant additional paranormal and horror elements. It takes place in multiple timelines in three locations—Haiti (not long after the slave rebellion that gave Saint-Domingue its independence from France and a new name), the fictional Beauford Grove in Alabama (in the 1800s and forward to the present), and modern-day Boston. It’s in Boston that the book opens, where the protagonist, Evangeline (Eva), is a hematologist struggling with a desperate pediatric case that calls for equally desperate decisions. The story un...