audio books
"Good morning, Psychic Surveys, how can I help?"
The latest in a long line of psychically-gifted females, Ruby Davis, can see through the veil that separates this world and the next, helping grounded souls to move towards the light - or 'home' as Ruby calls it. Not just a job for Ruby, it's a crusade and one she wants to bring to the High Street. Psychic Surveys is born.
Based in Lewes, East Sussex, Ruby and her team of freelance psychics have been kept busy of late. Specialising in domestic cases, their solid reputation is spreading - it's not just the dead that can rest in peace but the living too. All is threatened when Ruby receives a call from the irate new owner of Highdown Hall. Film star, Cynthia Hart, is still in residence, despite having died in 1958.
Winter deepens and so does the mystery surrounding Cynthia. She insists the devil is blocking her path to the light long after Psychic Surveys have 'disproved' it. Investigating her apparently unblemished background, Ruby is pulled further and further into Cynthia's world and the darkness that now inhabits it. For the first time in her career, Ruby's deepest beliefs are challenged.
Does evil truly exist? And if so, is it the most relentless force of all?
"This isn't a ghost we're dealing with. If only it were that simple..."
Eighteen years ago, when psychic Ruby Davis was a child, her mother - also a psychic - suffered a nervous breakdown. Ruby was never told why. "It won't help you to know," the only answer ever given. Fast forward to the present and Ruby is earning a living from her gift, running a high street consultancy - Psychic Surveys - specialising in domestic spiritual clearance.
Boasting a strong track record, business is booming. Dealing with spirits has become routine but there is more to the paranormal than even Ruby can imagine. Someone - something - stalks her, terrifying but also strangely familiar. Hiding in the shadows, it is fast becoming bolder and the only way to fight it is for the past to be revealed - no matter what the danger.
When you can see the light, you can see the darkness too.
And sometimes the darkness stares straight back at you.
"We all have to face our demons at some point."
Psychic Surveys - specialists in domestic spiritual clearance - have never been busier. Although exhausted, Ruby is pleased. Her track record as well as her down-to-earth, no-nonsense approach inspires faith in the haunted, who willingly call on her high street consultancy when the supernatural takes hold.
But that's all about to change.
Two cases prove trying: 44 Gilmore Street, home to a particularly violent spirit, and the reincarnation case of Elisha Grey. When Gilmore Street attracts press attention, matters quickly deteriorate. Dubbed the 'New Enfield', the 'Ghost of Gilmore Street' inflames public imagination, but as Ruby and the team fail repeatedly to evict the entity, faith in them wavers.
Dealing with negative press, the strangeness surrounding Elisha, and a spirit that's becoming increasingly territorial, Ruby's at breaking point. It seems some demons just won't let go...
It's not wise to linger at the crossroads...
In a quiet Dorset Village, Old Cross Cottage has stood for centuries, overlooking the place where four roads meet. Marred by tragedy, it's had a series of residents, none of whom have stayed for long. Pink and pretty, with a thatched roof, it should be an ideal retreat, but as new owners Rachel and Mark Bell discover, it's anything but.
Ruby Davis hasn't quite told her partner the truth. She's promised Cash a holiday in the country but she's also promised the Bells that she'll investigate the unrest that haunts this ancient dwelling. Hoping to combine work and pleasure, she soon realises this is a far more complex case than she had ever imagined.
As events take a sinister turn, lives are in jeopardy. If the terrible secrets of Old Cross Cottage are ever to be unearthed, an entire village must dig up its past.
This is what we're dealing with here, the institutionalised…
Brookbridge housing estate has long been a source of work for Psychic Surveys. Formerly the site of a notorious mental hospital, Ruby and her team have had to deal with spirits manifesting in people’s homes, still trapped in the cold grey walls of the asylum they once inhabited. There’ve been plenty of traumatic cases but never a mass case – until now.
The last remaining hospital block is due to be pulled down, a building teeming with spirits of the most resistant kind, the institutionalised. With the help of a newfound friend, as well as Cash and her colleagues, Ruby attempts to tackle this mammoth task. At the same time her private life is demanding attention, unravelling in ways she could never imagine.
About to delve deep into madness, will she ever find her way back?
What if evil won't let go?
Along a sheltered lane, deep in the Sussex countryside, sits a house that is sometimes called home, the tenants it has held unable to forget it. When Ruby Davis gets a distressed call from Rosie Cowell, the latest inhabitant, little does she know that her life too will change forever, from the moment she steps over the threshold.
Unlike other houses of its kind, such as Bolskine and Borley, Blakemort has no reputation. Indeed, there is no written record of it anywhere; its history is quite untraceable. But Blakemort exists, and it exists for one purpose only. To torment.
How do you fight a house like Blakemort? Even with a team on your side, and the light encircling you? Is it possible to take on a darkness this deep?
In Legion, Blakemort is back.
Did it ever truly go away?
Promises to Keep is the seventh in the best-selling Psychic Surveys series that features plot twists, compelling characters, and a mystery at its dark heart!
Heavily pregnant, Ruby Davis has handed over the reins of her psychic business to Corinna, Theo, and Ness, who all lament the loss of her leadership. Corinna, at the helm, is determined to keep up their brilliant track record, with case after case continuing to come in. But something has caught her attention. Not a case, exactly, but a dark local mystery.
Rayners Wood forms part of a local landscape feature known as the Devil's Triangle, with Chanctonbury Ring and Cissbury Ring being the other points of the formation, and all associated with cults and black magic.
Called to the Bows' home in Lindfield, where the family is experiencing psychic phenomena, Corinna senses a link between the woods and another house in the village, one that the spirit at the Bows' house is trying to warn them about - Low Cottage. Further investigations reveal that certain houses in Lindfield form a triangle of their own, with Low Cottage and Rayners Wood being the bottom points of each formation, indicating something hellish.
Corinna has been warned by Ruby to keep their work as ordinary as possible after Blakemort, to keep the original purpose of the business: to specialize in spiritual domestic clearance and nothing more. But with Psychic Surveys, very often, the ordinary leads to the extraordinary, and as more links are forged between Low Cottage and Rayners Wood, mortal danger awaits....
Life may have moved on to new challenges for Ruby Davis, now being a mother to baby Hendrix, but she's back at the helm of Psychic Surveys, her spiritual domestic clearance company, and the cases just keep getting stranger.
A new client, Carrie-Ann Kendall, has suffered an accident at sea, one that - according to her - she shouldn't have survived.
Visiting a clairvoyant who is apparently terrified by her presence, only confirms this notion. It is now up to Ruby and the team to find out whether Carrie-Ann has cheated death. If so, what are the consequences, and for how long?
Leon Vasilescu is the clairvoyant, now missing since encountering Carrie-Ann, and whom Psychic Surveys must track down. But in doing so, they will encounter another danger, one that is far more personal to Ruby and her mother Jessica, and could have them facing death too.
What do you do when a whole town is haunted?
In 1899, in the North Yorkshire market town of Thorpe Morton, a tragedy occurred; 59 people died at the market hall whilst celebrating Christmas Eve, many of them children. One hundred years on and the spirits of the deceased are restless still, 'haunting' the community, refusing to let them forget.
In 1999, psychic investigators Theo Lawson and Ness Patterson are called in to help, sensing immediately on arrival how weighed down the town is. Quickly they discover there's no safe haven. The past taints everything.
Hurtling towards the anniversary as well as a new millennium, their aim is to move the spirits on, to cleanse the atmosphere so everyone - the living and the dead - can start again. But the spirits prove resistant and soon Theo and Ness are caught up in battle, fighting against something that knows their deepest fears and can twist them in the most dangerous of ways.
They'll need all their courage to succeed and the help of a little girl too - a spirit who didn't die at the hall, who shouldn't even be there...
"That house, that damned house. Will it ever stop haunting me?"
After her parents' divorce, five-year old Corinna Greer moves into Blakemort with her mother and brother. Set on the edge of the village of Whitesmith, the only thing attractive about it is the rent. A 'sensitive', Corinna is aware from the start that something is wrong with the house. Very wrong.
Christmas is coming but at Blakemort that's not something to get excited about. A house that sits and broods, that calculates and considers, it's then that it lashes out - the attacks endured over five years becoming worse. There are also the spirits, some willing residents, others not. Amongst them a boy, a beautiful, spiteful boy...
Who are they? What do they want? And is Corinna right when she suspects it's not just the dead the house traps but the living too?
What happened all those years ago, in the dark?
In 1977, Minch Point Lighthouse on Skye's most westerly tip was suddenly abandoned by the keeper and his family - no reason ever found. In the decade that followed, it became a haunt for teenagers on the hunt for thrills. Playing Thirteen Ghost Stories, they'd light thirteen candles, blowing one out after every story told until only the darkness remained.
In 1987, following her success working on a case with Sussex Police, twenty-five year old psychic, Ness Patterson, is asked to investigate recent happenings at the lighthouse. Local teen, Ally Dunn, has suffered a breakdown following time spent there and is refusing to speak to anyone. Arriving at her destination on a stormy night, Ness gets a terrifying insight into what the girl experienced.
The case growing ever more sinister, Ness realises: some games should never be played.
Could you find your way through Hell?
Ruby Davis runs Psychic Surveys, a high street company specializing in domestic spiritual clearance. Having inherited her ability to see beyond the veil that separates this world and the next from her mother Jessica, she is busy helping grounded spirits to cross the great divide. In turn, Jessica inherited her gift from her mother Sarah, and Sarah from Rosamund.
Throughout the early 20th century, Rosamund Davis was a woman held in high regard concerning her mediumship abilities and her pioneering work with London's famous psychical society. She published many papers on psychic matters, although there are some that remain unpublished, for the eyes of the Davis family only. It is these unavailable works concerning the non-spirit that fascinate many - entities born of negative thoughts that subsequently take on their own energy. Entities known as demons.
But what caused her to write about such dark matter?
From her own notes, in her own words, this is Rosamund's account.
"The dead of night, Jess, I wish they'd leave me alone."
Jessamin Wade's husband is dead - a death she feels wholly responsible for. As a way of coping with her grief, she keeps him 'alive' in her imagination - talking to him every day, laughing with him, remembering the good times they had together. She thinks she will 'hear' him better if she goes somewhere quieter, away from the hustle and bustle of her hometown, Brighton. Her destination is Glenelk in the Highlands of Scotland, a region her grandfather hailed from and the subject of a much-loved painting from childhood.
Arriving in the village late at night, it is a bleak and forbidding place. However, the house she is renting - Skye Croft - is warm and welcoming. Quickly she meets the locals. Her landlord, Fionnlagh Maccaillin, is an ex-army man with obvious and not so obvious injuries. Maggie, who runs the village shop, is also an enigma, startling her with her strange 'insights'. But it is Stan she instantly connects with. Maccaillin's grandfather and a frail, old man, he is grief-stricken from the recent loss of his beloved Beth.
All four are caught in the past. All four are unable to let go. Their lives entwining in mysterious ways, will they always belong to the ghosts that haunt them?
An extreme land breeds extreme emotions…
Comraich – Gaelic for Sanctuary – that’s what this ancient fortress of a house in the Highlands of Scotland has offered its generations, a haven from the world beyond.
The nesting instinct kicking in, a pregnant Jessamin decides that Comraich, which she shares with her partner Fionnlagh Maccaillin, needs refreshing. Getting to work in one of the spare bedrooms she makes a startling discovery, one that pulls her into a world of the intense and disturbing passions of others that have been here before.
Jessamin has to decide.
Will delving deeper into Comraich’s history bring hope and peace to this troubled house or return her to a darkness she’s only recently left behind?
Welcome to the asylum...
2015
Their troubled past behind them, married couple, Rob and Louise, visit Venice for the first time together, looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Not just a romantic destination, it's also the 'most haunted city in the world' and soon, Louise finds herself the focus of an entity she can't quite get to grips with - a 'veiled lady' who stalks her.
1938
After marrying young Venetian doctor, Enrico Sanuto, Charlotte moves from England to Venice, full of hope for the future. Home though is not in the city; it's on Poveglia, in the Venetian lagoon, where she is set to work in an asylum, tending to those that society shuns. As the true horror of her surroundings reveals itself, hope turns to dust.
From the labyrinthine alleys of Venice to the twisting, turning corridors of Poveglia, their fates intertwine. Vengeance only waits for so long...
A snowstorm, a highway, a lonely hotel...
Devastated by the deaths of her parents and disillusioned with life, Caroline Daynes is in America trying to connect with their memory. Travelling to her mother's hometown of Williamsfield in Pennsylvania, she is caught in a snowstorm and forced to stop at The Egress hotel - somewhere she'd planned to visit as her parents honeymooned there.
From the moment she sets foot inside the lobby and meets the surly receptionist, she realises this is a hotel like no other. Charming and unique, it seems lost in time with a whole cast of compelling characters sheltering behind closed doors.
As the storm deepens, so does the mystery of The Egress. Who are these people she's stranded with, what secrets do they hide? And, in a situation that's becoming increasingly nightmarish, is it possible to find solace?
Highgate, perhaps the most famous cemetery in the world, is renowned for its Victorian Gothic splendour, famous residents, its vampire and, of course, ghosts...
Lucy Klein, 42, is not only obsessed with Highgate, she works there too, organising tours for those with an interest in some of the finest Victorian funerary architecture in existence. Single, and on the shy side, she is nonetheless content with her life, or so she thinks. When she meets the enigmatic Zak Harborne, she realises what she's been missing and quickly falls in love. He's everything she's ever wanted...isn't he?
1972, and Emma Matthews, a 19-year-old history student, also feels as though she's on the outside. After visiting a derelict Highgate with a group of friends, she starts to feel a connection, a sense of meaning to her life, in amongst the tombstones, the crosses and the angels. Returning to Highgate over and over, she discovers both a paradise and a garden decidedly more savage.
Grace Derby is just 11 when she encounters the gentleman, tall and with a tall hat, a long black coat and a cape about his shoulders. It is the 1850s and street urchins such as her are not accustomed to kindness from those belonging to the upper echelons. Proffering money for food, for her and her family, he asks nothing in return. Curious about the man with the kind blue eyes, she follows him one day... all the way to Highgate.
For some, it seems, all roads lead to Highgate...
Fight fire with fire.
Kenna Jackson is stressed. London is sucking the life out of her, and there’s no way to escape the rat race. Or is there? When an opportunity presents itself out of the blue, she decides to take it. After all, it’s change she craves.
Drumlin Castle has stood for 10 centuries and no doubt will stand for 10 more. Set in the heart of the Aberdeenshire countryside, it’s witnessed the best of life…and the worst. Not much is known of Rohaise, who once lived there, only that she was a fiery redhead, the mistress of the Laird, and that she lost her life defending both him and the castle.
As Kenna settles into her new role as Drumlin’s manager, she becomes more and more intrigued with Rohaise, determined to flesh out this mysterious figure from a bygone age. The past, though, as she’s about to learn, can be a dark and dangerous place.
There is a doll. There is a legend...
When museum curator Annie Hawkins walks into a diner in Idaho Falls, seeking the help of 22-year-old Shady Groves with an old broken doll named Mandy, life takes a dramatic turn for both of them. Psychometry is the ability to sense or read the history of an object just by touching it, and Annie has heard Shady has this psychic ability.
Mandy may look harmless, but Annie believes she’s possessed and, after handling her, Shady can only agree. She feels tainted by the doll that now invades her thoughts and dreams, terrifying her. There’s only one solution: to understand the doll, her history, what has possessed her, and why. Knowledge is power, Annie tells Shady. It’s protection.
The pair set off on a road trip - along with Shady’s old high school friend Ray - one that will take them from Idaho into the depths of Canada, desperate to trace Mandy’s past, to find out something, anything, about the demonic doll that accompanies them in the trunk of the car.
The truth, when it comes, is far deadlier than any of them could have realized.
When you look in the mirror, who do you see?
With Mandy the haunted doll now safely ensconced in Mason Town Museum, sealed in a glass case, Shady Groves and her colleagues, Annie and Ray, can relax. After a fashion. The small-town museum they run is not like others, it’s a place that seeks to contain and understand artifacts and relics charged with negative energy. Their aim is to gradually reduce how potent that energy can be, and the destruction it can lead to.
All is well, until Shady chances upon a mirror in a thrift store. The reflection staring back at her is not quite her own. The artifact is purchased and brought back to the museum, where, under controlled circumstances, they begin to explore its history.
A girl, a woman, appears to be the previous owner. One who is troubled, who swings between emotions like some wild pendulum. As more is revealed, Shady follows her down each dark avenue, finally uncovering an involvement in one of the most shocking episodes of American history. Appalled, she refuses to continue.
But, as Shady, Annie and Ray know, sometimes there’s no turning back.
Just what did happen at Cades Home Farm?
Before the myth, there was the truth.
On a road trip to Baker City and the mountains of Oregon, Shady Groves, Ray Bartlett and their friends are looking forward to a few days’ vacation. On the way, they make an unscheduled motel stop where Shady encounters Missy Davenport, the proprietor, an old photograph of Missy too, and her family, horror attached to it.
Arriving in Baker City, they stay at the Grand Willmott before heading into the wilderness, another photograph down a gloomy corridor there, this time of ten men in animal masks, armed with pitchforks, so at odds with the hotel’s luxury surroundings.
Two photographs in less than 24-hours, both of which unsettle her.
But is that the only connection?
Piece by piece, Shady will find there’s more to the photographs than she could ever imagine. And that creatures of myth and legend, hybrids, could be responsible for a spate of missing people, including Brandi Hadley, the most recent person from Baker City and the local area to disappear without trace.
A renovation. In the countryside. Just over an hour's train ride from London.
An ideal family home. Sold unseen. At auction.
Married couple Al and Liz Greenaway love London, but when they discover an impressive country property for sale in need of some TLC, for the same price as their London flat, they decide to go for it. For them, life is all about reinventing themselves and keeping things fresh, and this house marks an exciting new chapter.
In the week running up to Christmas, it is Liz who finds herself at Carfax House, alone. Al's held up with work. No matter, there's plenty to occupy her before he arrives, getting it ready for the festive season. A fine house. Once. Solitary, romantic, isolated, and quiet. So quiet that, for the first time in years, Liz can hear her own thoughts as long buried memories emerge. And there's an echo in them, a whisper...
For someone else in the house, memories are emerging too.
Carfax House - what if it's haunted?
On a strange island, amongst strangers, a strange tale unfolds....
Beth Williams leads a lonely existence, going to work, then returning to her flat to watch TV, eat, and sleep - the same routine on repeat, day after day. It’s a loneliness she nurtures, finds comfort in, even, except at Christmas, a time of dread.
Then comes an invite, an offer from an old friend, to join him for "The Damned Season" at his house on an island off the coast of Anglesey, for Christmas with a difference. Intrigued as well as desperate, Beth accepts, arriving there a few days before Christmas Eve.
She’s not the only one invited, however - there are four others, all strangers to each other, all crossing murky, choppy waters to meet their host, a much-changed man who seems not only surprised to see them, but dismayed and weary, too. Who is nothing but a husk.
With the boatman gone and the mists closing in, Beth finds herself in a solitary house of ever-changing rooms and never-ending corridors, of people disappearing and then reappearing, of feasts and famine. And then there are the doors, constantly multiplying, and locked…aren’t they?
The Damned Season. It’s coming.