Publication January 2013

The third in the Nell West/Michael Flint series

Stilter House, set in a remote part of the Derbyshire Peaks, is said to stand on haunted ground. Once there was a much older property there – a house in which the notorious Isobel Acton committed a vicious crime. But antiques dealer Nell West only knows the house as her dead husband’s childhood home, and is happy to value the contents.

In Oxford, Nell’s lover, Michael Flint is warned that Nell and her small daughter, Beth, must not go to Stilter House. ‘Because Esmond is still there…’

Soon after Nell and Beth arrive, Nell hears a piano being played somewhere in the house. But the music room is closed up, the piano is locked, and the key is missing. And clues left by earlier occupants suggest the music has been heard before…

As Nell and Michael are pulled deeper into Stilter House’s dark past, it becomes horrifingly clear that not only is the music bound up with Esmond, it is also tangled with Isobel’s macabre fate.

Publication March 2012

The second of the Nell West/Michael Flint series

When Benedict Doyle finds himself the owner of his great-grandfather’s North London house, he is dismayed. For it was in that house, as a frightened eight-year-old, that the strange glimpses into his great-grandfather’s life began. Glimpses that resembled faded ciné footage or an old, scratched recording, and that have gradually revealed sinister darknesses in his family’s past.
Through those darknesses runs the grisly thread of an old legend about a chess set – thirty-two carved figures believed to possess a dark power, but shut away in the forgotten library of a tumbledown Irish castle for many decades.

Michael Flint, meeting Benedict in Oxford, starts to research some of the strange shutter-flash images, and chilling facts begin to emerge – facts that suggest the legend contained a disturbing reality.

And when Nell West – no stranger to the eeriness in old properties – begins to compile an inventory of Holly Lodge’s contents for her antique business, it seems that the chess set’s malevolence might be reaching out to the present.

From the reference books: The term sin eater refers to a person who, by means of food and drink, would ritualistically take on the sins of a dead or dying person, thus absolving his or her soul. Parts of the Old Testament hint at the ritual of sin-eating, and over the centuries it seems to have been performed, in various forms, in many parts of the world. The last recorded instance of a sin-eater in the UK was in Shropshire as recently as 1893.

Published by Severn House in 2011

A house with a sinister past… and a grisly power.

When Michael Flint is asked by American friends to look over an old Shropshire house they have unexpectedly inherited, he is reluctant to leave the quiet of his Oxford study.

But when he sees Charect House, its uncanny echoes from the past fascinate him – even though it has such a sinister reputation no one has lived in it for almost a century.

It’s not until Michael meets the young widow, Nell West, that the menace within the house wakes. Is Nell’s small daughter the catalyst that causes the Dead Man’s Knock to be heard again and calls up the nightmare figure bearing a flickering light with a grisly power? The figure with black pits where his eyes should be, who seems to threaten not only Nell’s daughter, but also Michael’s goddaughter, thousands of miles away?

Old diaries, found during the renovations, provide Michael and Nell with glimpses of a darkness that once engulfed Charect House and its occupants. But can the truth be uncovered before it causes new tragedy?

Download the first chapter of Property of a Lady here, courtesy of www.severnhouse.com