Format: Paperback, 416 pages
Release Date: September 26, 2023
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Paranormal
A story about family secrets and two young women who discover they're Nordic witches.
Cordelia Bone's meticulously crafted life and career in Dallas are
crashing down around her thanks to a philandering husband with criminal
debts.
When her older, carefree sister, Eustace - a cannabis
grower in Boulder, calls to inform her the great aunt they never met has
died and they must travel to a small town in Connecticut to deal with
the estate, she sees an opportunity to unload the house and save
herself.
But once there, the sisters learn they are getting much
more than they bargained for. The Victorian mansion they stand to
inherit is bound in a dynasty trust controlled by their late aunt's
aging attorney who insists they inhabit the house and retain it but
keeps them in the dark about the peculiar rituals of their ancestors.
Not to mention a sexy, tattooed groundskeeper with a shrouded past who
refuses to leave the carriage house and a crypt full of dead relatives
looming at the property line.
As both women grapple with their
current predicament, they come face to face with a haunting family
secret, the truth of what happened to their mother, and the enemy that's
been stalking them from the shadows for generations. In a twisting
torrent of terror and blood, the sisters must uncover the power within
them to heal their fractured relationship, reverse their mysteriously
declining health, and claim the lineage they wanted to escape but now
must embrace if they are to survive at Bone Hill.
Ava Morgyn's The Witches of Bone Hill is a contemporary paranormal centered around a pair of sisters who will shortly learn about their family, including their mother, that they never knew about. Cordelia Bone is a realtor in Texas who has been betrayed by an affair by husband. Her reputation is destroyed and so is her finances. Just when things are looking bleak, her older, carefree sister, Eustace, a cannabis
grower in Boulder, calls with some interesting news. Even though the sisters have drifted away over the years, they learn that an aunt they never met has died, leaving them with a house.
Cordelia sees this as the
answer to her problems. She’s eager to go see the house, sell it as fast
as possible, and use the money to repair her life. But once there, the sisters learn they are getting much more than they
bargained for. The Victorian mansion they stand to inherit is bound in a
dynasty trust controlled by their late aunt's aging attorney who
insists they inhabit the house and retain it or they lose everything. Then there's the tattooed groundskeeper (Gordon Jablonski) with a shrouded past who refuses to leave the
carriage house and a crypt full of dead relatives looming at the
property line.
As both women grapple with their current predicament, they come face to
face with a haunting family secret, the truth of what happened to their
mother Magda, who was likely murdered, as well as other devastating secrets about their descendants, and the enemy that's been stalking them from the shadows for
generations waiting for the right time to strike and gain their revenge on be Bone's. In a twisting torrent of terror and blood, the sisters must
uncover the power within them to heal their fractured relationship,
reverse their mysteriously declining health, and claim the lineage they
wanted to escape but now must embrace if they are to survive at Bone
Hill.
*Thoughts*
This book has all the things...ghosts, witches, blood magic, romance,
mystery,murder...the house is its own character, especially when Cordy comes into her own magical heritage and starts understanding that not is all that it's cracked up to be. There were also times when the story dragged a
little and I felt like the sisters were just rehashing the same subjects
over and over. The story itself is on the dark side with very eerie, ghost like chills to it, and a sickening scene with animal cruelty that will likely not go over well. In the end, the final 3 chapters were definitely the most entertaining and chilling of the entire story.
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press
for this complimentary ARC. Opinions expressed in this review are
completely my own.
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CHAPTER ONE THE CALL
THEY SAY WHAT doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Cordelia was beginning to think “they” were liars.
She looked up at the gleaming, white-brick two-story and willed herself to feel something, staring at the sun bouncing off the paint until her eyes began to water and her head felt heavy. The first time she’d seen the house, she’d thought it looked immaculate. A paragon of suburban construction, solid and flawless. Her very own ivory tower. It seemed molded to the earth, dominating the end of the cul-de-sac like a modern fortress, rising from the carefully shaped boxwoods and the rows of cheery marigolds and coleus, the menace of black-iron fencing, as if to proclaim its value to anyone passing by. She’d even imagined a white dog behind the gated drive to complete the picture. Something regal—a standard poodle or a borzoi.
And of course, the house had a certain whisper …
But over the last several weeks, when she walked into it, she couldn’t feel anything except betrayal. The space didn’t whisper to her anymore. It was like John’s affair had tainted their connection, and she and the house couldn’t hear each other.
Looking at it now, she felt only an alarming sense of numbness where the pang of loss should have been. Maybe the grief had spiked when she’d gotten the notice of default from her mortgage company—a herald she’d been quietly dreading from a lender known for property seizure—and then had receded like an outgoing tide. Maybe this was the drawback before the tsunami.
The moving truck angled toward the drive, rumbling in the street. Cordelia simmered with a barely repressed shame, like an evicted mistress with her negligees scattered across the lawn. She hated to think of her neighbors witnessing this. John had secreted away whatever he wanted at her first prolonged absence, along with the money in their joint accounts and the business they’d built together. Cordelia mentally flogged herself again for agreeing to not list herself as co-owner of their agency. It had made so much sense when he explained it to her—him pulling back to take brokerage classes since her income was greater, protecting her assets from liability should the agency incur debts, thinking it was all fifty-fifty anyway since they were legally married. Outsmarting the fine print, he’d called it. What a gullible fool she’d been.
And then the notices had begun to arrive—maxed-out credit cards, payday lenders frothing at the mouth for instant reimbursement, the accounts he kept opening in her name even after he and Allison split for Vegas, then San Diego, Key West, and God knew where else. All on her tab apparently. She’d done her best to explain, to make whatever small, indemnifying payments she could, but he’d poked so many holes in her finances it was like trying to bail the Titanic with a colander. She was staring down the inevitable—divorce, foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness. They would fall on her like dominoes, one after the other.
A budding tension between the eyes, the initial squeeze of an oncoming headache she’d become all too familiar with in the last six months, forced her to look away and turn toward the street. Her mother’s tired face sprung to mind, the sharp intake of air she’d make at the onset of pain, shadows puddling in her eye sockets. Cordelia had been just a girl when Maggie started getting them—migraines, the doctors would say, or cluster headaches. They would give her hormones and pain relievers and supplements, but still they came without warning, dragging the smile from Maggie’s face and the spring from her step, causing her to get as low as she could—the sofa or the floor—and huddle there in the grip of pain.
Cordelia winced at the memory as much as at the ache in her head. She didn’t like to think about the things she had in common with her mother or where those things could lead, had led for Maggie in the end.
“Where do you want these?” Molly, her new assistant, asked, walking up with a gargantuan arrangement of irises and gladiolas as an angry streak of black and tan barreled past their ankles.
“Hold on,” Cordelia told her, turning to jog after what could only be Perry Ellis, her neighbor’s Australian terrier. She caught up with him behind the truck, where he had a mover cornered inside. Fifteen pounds of swagger and spite, he looked like a roughed-up Yorkie with mutton chops and made everything on their street his business.
Cordelia bent over and scooped him up, his body rigid as he continued to bark, every shriek hitting her square between the eyes. “It’s okay—he’s missing most of his teeth,” she explained by way of apology to the frightened mover, then marched toward the yard to the right of her own. Mrs. Robichaud was already halfway down the driveway.
“He snuck right past me,” the older woman claimed as she reached for him with unsteady hands, resin baubles clacking. Of course, the glaucoma meant that Perry Ellis snuck right past Mrs. Robichaud almost every time she opened the door.
“It’s the movers,” Cordelia said with a smile, handing him over. “He was just defending his territory.”
Mrs. Robichaud glanced at the truck. “Oh, I was worried this day would come. Perry Ellis and I will be so sad to see you go.”
Cordelia put on a brave face. She would miss the quiet old lady next door who always invited her in for tea and regaled her with tales of international travel in the seventies. She would miss her monogrammed teaspoons and matching pantsuits, the soft overlap of her curls like duck feathers. Mostly she would miss her kind smile and generous nature. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to bring you your groceries anymore.”
“Don’t you worry about us,” Mrs. Robichaud said, batting a hand. “You just look out for yourself.” Her puckered mouth scrunched up in distaste. “I knew you were too good for that man, always slinking around with his gold watches and shiny loafers, giving Perry Ellis the stink eye. Thought he was back last night when I saw someone at your door, but this man was far too large to be John. Had Perry Ellis fit to be tied.”
“Last night?” Cordelia racked her brain for who might be knocking on her door after dark, but she had no idea. She’d taken to staying in a hotel once it was clear she would have to sell. With the house already in pre-foreclosure and her business yanked out from under her, bills with interest piling up in the rolltop desk, this sale was her last-ditch effort to avoid total collapse.
“Walked all around peeking in windows, then left something in the mailbox before he drove away,” she said. “These old peepers couldn’t make out much, just shoulders like a gorilla.” Suddenly, her eyes widened and her face brightened. “I’ll bet he was an early buyer wanting to see the property before someone else snatches it up!”
Cordelia felt her stomach drop. She didn’t have the heart to tell Mrs. Robichaud that the house hadn’t been listed until this morning.
“I’ll bet he was,” she lied before stepping away. “Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything. I may not be next door, but I’m still close enough to help a friend,” she added as the old woman turned back for her house. Cordelia watched until she was safely indoors and then scurried over to the mailbox, pulling out the single envelope waiting inside.
She slid a finger to open it before she noticed that Molly was still standing on the sidewalk, the giant flower arrangement trembling in her tired hands. “Oh gosh, Molly, I’m sorry. You can put that on the entry table. Thanks.”
Cordelia watched her make her way up the walk in tight, little steps. Unlike the last one, Molly was too eager to please. She lacked Allison’s confidence, and she asked too many questions. But she put in the hours and would drive to kingdom come if Cordelia told her to. More important, she lacked Allison’s natural blond highlights and runner’s legs. Cordelia could still hear the sound of her old assistant’s naked ass rubbing against the Carrara marble, John grunting like a wild hog every time she walked into the kitchen. Cordelia would stand in the middle of the living room and take inventory of every surface she thought they probably fucked on. It didn’t leave her many places to sit.
Loyalty was what Cordelia needed as she sifted the wreckage of her life, and there was something in Molly’s eager-beaver personality that she found endearing. She shared perfectionism and ambition with her new apprentice, qualities needed to compete and succeed in her field, where every house had five agents waiting to list it. Without them, Cordelia never would have gotten as far as she did. And of course, there was the knack—an uncanny timeliness and intuitive knowing that Cordelia possessed which couldn’t replace hard work but made a sizable difference.
Molly didn’t have the knack, but maybe it would rub off on her. After all, hadn’t it transferred to Cordelia from her mother after so many years? That’s what Cordelia told herself when her hunches and her clients’ needs intersected a little too perfectly, leaving her skin bristling with an indefinable tingle. In time, Molly would get used to Cordelia’s inclination to predict the little things like rain showers or an offer about to come in. Some of the mysticism would wear off. Like Cordelia, she would learn to explain it away as an exceptionally perceptive gut honed by experience and evolution. Luck was not genetic, and Cordelia preferred to ground herself in the firmly rational, where things could be explained. Most things, anyway.
And then there were the whispers. But Cordelia didn’t talk about those, hadn’t since she was a small girl of six or seven. And what was there to say? They were so scarcely perceptible she wasn’t sure they were there at all. Not everything she’d experienced could be so assuredly minimized.
A sudden hammering jolted her. To her left, Molly—mallet in hand—was pounding the For Sale sign into the emerald-green lawn with all the enthusiasm of a drummer in a death-metal band. Once the stakes were a foot deep, she straightened. “Done.”
But Cordelia didn’t appreciate the finality in her tone. Every stroke of the mallet felt like it was proclaiming her failure. As a wife. As a businesswoman. As a person. She’d procured an image over the years that she could hide behind, but she’d never quite managed the finer complexities of “fitting in”—a relic of growing up her mother’s daughter. John’s vanilla-wafer mien went a long way toward securing her place in the community and her mind as an exemplar of normalcy. Her impostor syndrome had been in overdrive since he left.
As if to affirm Molly’s pronouncement, the largest crow Cordelia had ever seen landed atop the sign, cawing rudely in her direction, pinning her with one horrid obsidian eye.
She scowled at its greasy black feathers as it launched into the air and sailed over her roof, an ominous blight on her perfect specimen of a house. As it disappeared, her gaze dropped to one of the dormer windows, curtains parted. She stood between them, the stern-faced woman dressed in black, a bonnet of white hair piled on her head as she stared down at Cordelia malevolently, pale as death itself.
Cordelia fell back a step, heart grinding to a halt within her chest, breath trapped inside as she gave over to little-girl terror. Not again, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut. Not again, not again, not again.
Her fingers began to buzz with a pins-and-needles effect she couldn’t ignore. She opened her eyes to check her cell phone, the home screen lighting up with a picture of her and John on their wedding day—flushed faces pressed together, electric smiles dazzling. They were probably four glasses of champagne in when she snapped that shot. It used to be her favorite. Now, it filled her with equal parts doubt and longing.
THEY SAY WHAT doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Cordelia was beginning to think “they” were liars.
She looked up at the gleaming, white-brick two-story and willed herself to feel something, staring at the sun bouncing off the paint until her eyes began to water and her head felt heavy. The first time she’d seen the house, she’d thought it looked immaculate. A paragon of suburban construction, solid and flawless. Her very own ivory tower. It seemed molded to the earth, dominating the end of the cul-de-sac like a modern fortress, rising from the carefully shaped boxwoods and the rows of cheery marigolds and coleus, the menace of black-iron fencing, as if to proclaim its value to anyone passing by. She’d even imagined a white dog behind the gated drive to complete the picture. Something regal—a standard poodle or a borzoi.
And of course, the house had a certain whisper …
But over the last several weeks, when she walked into it, she couldn’t feel anything except betrayal. The space didn’t whisper to her anymore. It was like John’s affair had tainted their connection, and she and the house couldn’t hear each other.
Looking at it now, she felt only an alarming sense of numbness where the pang of loss should have been. Maybe the grief had spiked when she’d gotten the notice of default from her mortgage company—a herald she’d been quietly dreading from a lender known for property seizure—and then had receded like an outgoing tide. Maybe this was the drawback before the tsunami.
The moving truck angled toward the drive, rumbling in the street. Cordelia simmered with a barely repressed shame, like an evicted mistress with her negligees scattered across the lawn. She hated to think of her neighbors witnessing this. John had secreted away whatever he wanted at her first prolonged absence, along with the money in their joint accounts and the business they’d built together. Cordelia mentally flogged herself again for agreeing to not list herself as co-owner of their agency. It had made so much sense when he explained it to her—him pulling back to take brokerage classes since her income was greater, protecting her assets from liability should the agency incur debts, thinking it was all fifty-fifty anyway since they were legally married. Outsmarting the fine print, he’d called it. What a gullible fool she’d been.
And then the notices had begun to arrive—maxed-out credit cards, payday lenders frothing at the mouth for instant reimbursement, the accounts he kept opening in her name even after he and Allison split for Vegas, then San Diego, Key West, and God knew where else. All on her tab apparently. She’d done her best to explain, to make whatever small, indemnifying payments she could, but he’d poked so many holes in her finances it was like trying to bail the Titanic with a colander. She was staring down the inevitable—divorce, foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness. They would fall on her like dominoes, one after the other.
A budding tension between the eyes, the initial squeeze of an oncoming headache she’d become all too familiar with in the last six months, forced her to look away and turn toward the street. Her mother’s tired face sprung to mind, the sharp intake of air she’d make at the onset of pain, shadows puddling in her eye sockets. Cordelia had been just a girl when Maggie started getting them—migraines, the doctors would say, or cluster headaches. They would give her hormones and pain relievers and supplements, but still they came without warning, dragging the smile from Maggie’s face and the spring from her step, causing her to get as low as she could—the sofa or the floor—and huddle there in the grip of pain.
Cordelia winced at the memory as much as at the ache in her head. She didn’t like to think about the things she had in common with her mother or where those things could lead, had led for Maggie in the end.
“Where do you want these?” Molly, her new assistant, asked, walking up with a gargantuan arrangement of irises and gladiolas as an angry streak of black and tan barreled past their ankles.
“Hold on,” Cordelia told her, turning to jog after what could only be Perry Ellis, her neighbor’s Australian terrier. She caught up with him behind the truck, where he had a mover cornered inside. Fifteen pounds of swagger and spite, he looked like a roughed-up Yorkie with mutton chops and made everything on their street his business.
Cordelia bent over and scooped him up, his body rigid as he continued to bark, every shriek hitting her square between the eyes. “It’s okay—he’s missing most of his teeth,” she explained by way of apology to the frightened mover, then marched toward the yard to the right of her own. Mrs. Robichaud was already halfway down the driveway.
“He snuck right past me,” the older woman claimed as she reached for him with unsteady hands, resin baubles clacking. Of course, the glaucoma meant that Perry Ellis snuck right past Mrs. Robichaud almost every time she opened the door.
“It’s the movers,” Cordelia said with a smile, handing him over. “He was just defending his territory.”
Mrs. Robichaud glanced at the truck. “Oh, I was worried this day would come. Perry Ellis and I will be so sad to see you go.”
Cordelia put on a brave face. She would miss the quiet old lady next door who always invited her in for tea and regaled her with tales of international travel in the seventies. She would miss her monogrammed teaspoons and matching pantsuits, the soft overlap of her curls like duck feathers. Mostly she would miss her kind smile and generous nature. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to bring you your groceries anymore.”
“Don’t you worry about us,” Mrs. Robichaud said, batting a hand. “You just look out for yourself.” Her puckered mouth scrunched up in distaste. “I knew you were too good for that man, always slinking around with his gold watches and shiny loafers, giving Perry Ellis the stink eye. Thought he was back last night when I saw someone at your door, but this man was far too large to be John. Had Perry Ellis fit to be tied.”
“Last night?” Cordelia racked her brain for who might be knocking on her door after dark, but she had no idea. She’d taken to staying in a hotel once it was clear she would have to sell. With the house already in pre-foreclosure and her business yanked out from under her, bills with interest piling up in the rolltop desk, this sale was her last-ditch effort to avoid total collapse.
“Walked all around peeking in windows, then left something in the mailbox before he drove away,” she said. “These old peepers couldn’t make out much, just shoulders like a gorilla.” Suddenly, her eyes widened and her face brightened. “I’ll bet he was an early buyer wanting to see the property before someone else snatches it up!”
Cordelia felt her stomach drop. She didn’t have the heart to tell Mrs. Robichaud that the house hadn’t been listed until this morning.
“I’ll bet he was,” she lied before stepping away. “Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything. I may not be next door, but I’m still close enough to help a friend,” she added as the old woman turned back for her house. Cordelia watched until she was safely indoors and then scurried over to the mailbox, pulling out the single envelope waiting inside.
She slid a finger to open it before she noticed that Molly was still standing on the sidewalk, the giant flower arrangement trembling in her tired hands. “Oh gosh, Molly, I’m sorry. You can put that on the entry table. Thanks.”
Cordelia watched her make her way up the walk in tight, little steps. Unlike the last one, Molly was too eager to please. She lacked Allison’s confidence, and she asked too many questions. But she put in the hours and would drive to kingdom come if Cordelia told her to. More important, she lacked Allison’s natural blond highlights and runner’s legs. Cordelia could still hear the sound of her old assistant’s naked ass rubbing against the Carrara marble, John grunting like a wild hog every time she walked into the kitchen. Cordelia would stand in the middle of the living room and take inventory of every surface she thought they probably fucked on. It didn’t leave her many places to sit.
Loyalty was what Cordelia needed as she sifted the wreckage of her life, and there was something in Molly’s eager-beaver personality that she found endearing. She shared perfectionism and ambition with her new apprentice, qualities needed to compete and succeed in her field, where every house had five agents waiting to list it. Without them, Cordelia never would have gotten as far as she did. And of course, there was the knack—an uncanny timeliness and intuitive knowing that Cordelia possessed which couldn’t replace hard work but made a sizable difference.
Molly didn’t have the knack, but maybe it would rub off on her. After all, hadn’t it transferred to Cordelia from her mother after so many years? That’s what Cordelia told herself when her hunches and her clients’ needs intersected a little too perfectly, leaving her skin bristling with an indefinable tingle. In time, Molly would get used to Cordelia’s inclination to predict the little things like rain showers or an offer about to come in. Some of the mysticism would wear off. Like Cordelia, she would learn to explain it away as an exceptionally perceptive gut honed by experience and evolution. Luck was not genetic, and Cordelia preferred to ground herself in the firmly rational, where things could be explained. Most things, anyway.
And then there were the whispers. But Cordelia didn’t talk about those, hadn’t since she was a small girl of six or seven. And what was there to say? They were so scarcely perceptible she wasn’t sure they were there at all. Not everything she’d experienced could be so assuredly minimized.
A sudden hammering jolted her. To her left, Molly—mallet in hand—was pounding the For Sale sign into the emerald-green lawn with all the enthusiasm of a drummer in a death-metal band. Once the stakes were a foot deep, she straightened. “Done.”
But Cordelia didn’t appreciate the finality in her tone. Every stroke of the mallet felt like it was proclaiming her failure. As a wife. As a businesswoman. As a person. She’d procured an image over the years that she could hide behind, but she’d never quite managed the finer complexities of “fitting in”—a relic of growing up her mother’s daughter. John’s vanilla-wafer mien went a long way toward securing her place in the community and her mind as an exemplar of normalcy. Her impostor syndrome had been in overdrive since he left.
As if to affirm Molly’s pronouncement, the largest crow Cordelia had ever seen landed atop the sign, cawing rudely in her direction, pinning her with one horrid obsidian eye.
She scowled at its greasy black feathers as it launched into the air and sailed over her roof, an ominous blight on her perfect specimen of a house. As it disappeared, her gaze dropped to one of the dormer windows, curtains parted. She stood between them, the stern-faced woman dressed in black, a bonnet of white hair piled on her head as she stared down at Cordelia malevolently, pale as death itself.
Cordelia fell back a step, heart grinding to a halt within her chest, breath trapped inside as she gave over to little-girl terror. Not again, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut. Not again, not again, not again.
Her fingers began to buzz with a pins-and-needles effect she couldn’t ignore. She opened her eyes to check her cell phone, the home screen lighting up with a picture of her and John on their wedding day—flushed faces pressed together, electric smiles dazzling. They were probably four glasses of champagne in when she snapped that shot. It used to be her favorite. Now, it filled her with equal parts doubt and longing.
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