The Avelrow shelf
These books match the feeling and story ingredients you chose. Adjust the mix whenever you like.
Gothic Romance / Historical Mystery
Ailsa Crowe
Reinvention Fiction
Mairéad Kellan
The last school run began with a lunchbox Maggie Byrne could not bring herself to throw away. It sat on the passenger seat of her car at twenty past eight on a wet Tuesday morning, pink plastic gone cloudy at the corners, one hinge cracked, the faded sticker of a cartoon fox half-peeled from the lid. There was nothing inside it except a folded kitchen towel and the stale ghost of apple slices, but Maggie had washed it twice the night before, dried it with the good tea towel, and set it by the kettle as though Aoife might come downstairs half asleep and ask where her blue jumper was.
Gothic Romance
Ailsa Crowe
The solicitor had said Blackthorn House would be difficult to miss. Mara Quinn thought that was the sort of thing men said when they had never arrived anywhere in a hire car during hard rain with a cracked phone screen, a dying battery, and the sick certainty that the past had been sitting upright all these years, waiting for her to come back and look it in the face.
Psychological Horror
Lachlan Ashen
Independent investigator Mara Vale is publicly discredited at a national integrity hearing when impossible ash, a sealed childhood institution called Ash House, and the voice of her missing brother force her back toward the family secrets and official records she has spent her career exposing.
Civic Cozy Mystery
Orla Ashdown
Councillor and part-time actress Imogen Vale discovers the official minutes say she cast the deciding vote to demolish St Brigid's Court—the estate where her sister lives—even though the same record marks her absent and she was performing miles away. A mysterious notation points to an obsolete spousal-proxy rule and drags her estranged husband, county archivist Daniel, into a civic mystery about forged procedure, altered records and who has the power to make a false decision become official truth.
Gothic Romance
Ailsa Crowe
Some legacies should stay buried. Some loves refuse to. The Ghost at Ravensmere opens the gates to a moonlit coastal estate where inheritance, desire and dangerous truths refuse to remain politely in the past. Ailsa Crowe blends gothic atmosphere, haunted family history and romance into a story where the house remembers more than its living occupants are prepared to admit.