First published 2026
Julia Barlow has lost everything. Her job is gone, her apartment too, and she finds herself driving to Pemberton, the family's old Massachusetts estate. She tells herself she's checking on her grandmother, but really she needs a place to hide. The seventeenth-century house has other plans. Each night at 3:41 a.m., the grandfather clock stops. Lights flicker without cause. A voice pleads for help outside her bedroom door. Julia starts investigating the house's past and learns about a woman killed for witchcraft in 1692. The deeper she digs, the more family lies surface. Julia realizes the executed woman's story connects to Pemberton in ways no one wants revealed. The house holds the voices of women who died for secrets others wanted buried. Now Julia must face the truth about what happened centuries ago and why it still matters today.
Genres: fiction, historical-fiction, mystery, horror, supernatural, adult-fiction
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, eerie, haunting, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: buried-secrets, generational-trauma, haunted-past, unreliable-reality
Setting: Pemberton, Massachusetts, Salem
Period: 1692, 21st-century
352 pages · Hardcover · Poisoned Pen Press
Content warnings: death, murder