The Scottish Highlands, 1893.
Ingrid Barker arrives back at Strathbairn to attend the funeral of her old employer, Charles McCleod.
Every bone in Ingrid’s body screams for her to leave, and as she walks from the graveside, she can’t shake the suspicion that Charles was murdered. As she hurries to uncover the truth and get away from Strathbairn, another murder takes place – one that traps her in the very place she is desperate to escape from.
Running out of time and clues, can Ingrid evade the truth of that terrible night up at the abbey the last time she was here, and can she solve the mystery of Charles’ death before his ghost does away with her?
An unputdownable gothic mystery laced with dark family secrets, SECRETS TAKEN TO THE GRAVE is the second book in the Strathbrain Trilogy series of historical mystery novels by Isobel Blackthorn.
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Isobel Blackthorn is an award-winning author of immersive and inspiring fiction. She has penned over twenty-five books including a number of bestsellers.
Among her credits, Isobel’s biographical short story ‘Nothing to Declare’, which forms the first chapter of her biographical novel Emma’s Tapestry, was shortlisted for the Ada Cambridge Prose Prize 2019. One of her Canary Islands novels, A Prison in the Sun, was shortlisted in the LGBTQ
category of the Readers’ Favorite Book Awards 2020 and the International Book Awards 2021. The Cabin Sessions was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award 2018 and the Ditmar Awards 2018.
And The Unlikely Occultist: A biographical novel of Alice A. Bailey received an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Reader’s Favorite Book Awards.
Blackthorn is the author of the world’s only biography of Theosophist and mother of the New Age movement Alice Bailey – Alice A. Bailey: Life & Legacy. Isobel’s writing has appeared in journals and
websites around the world, including Esoteric Quarterly, New Dawn Magazine, Paranoia, Mused Literary Review, Trip Fiction, Backhand Stories, Fictive Dream and On Line Opinion. Isobel was a judge
for the Australasian Shadow Awards 2020 long fiction category. Her book reviews have appeared inNew Dawn Magazine, Esoteric Quarterly, Shiny New Books, Sisters in Crime, Australian Women Writers, Trip Fiction and Newtown Review of Books.
Isobel’s interests are many and varied. She has a long-standing association with the Canary Islands, having lived in Lanzarote in the late 1980s. A humanitarian and campaigner for social justice, in 1999
Isobel founded the internationally acclaimed Ghana Link, uniting two high schools, one a relatively privileged state school located in the heart of England, the other a materially impoverished school in
a remote part of the Upper Volta region of Ghana, West Africa. After working as a teacher, market trader and PA to a literary agent, she arrived at writing in her forties, and her stories are as diverse and intriguing as her life has been.
Isobel has performed her literary works at events in a range of settings and given workshops in creative writing.
British by birth, Isobel entered this world in Farnborough, Kent, UK. She has lived in England, Australia, Spain and the Canary Islands. She now lives and writes in Spain. She is currently at work on two novels composed in Spanish.
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My thoughts: Ingrid returns to Strathbrain for the funeral of her former employer, despite misgivings. What she learns there is that his supposed natural death wasn’t.
And there’s more – she finds a history of the McCleod family that details the bloody history of the members. Generations of them with murder on their minds. It makes her even more concerned about staying there as Miles is behaving strangely. Is he the one Charles’ ghost wants her to identify as his killer?
Her daughter, Susan, is happily settled in with the house’s staff, baking with the cook, helping the maid clean the fireplaces. It makes it harder for Ingrid to insist on returning to Winchester soon. She also learns some things about her own family, but these are happier. Until bones are found in the old Abbey and bring up more recent history and could change everything.
Haunted and sinister, Strathbrain is not a friendly house, but by putting its ghosts to bed, things might finally change. And as Christmas approaches, putting the past behind them and starting the new year fresh is something Ingrid really wants.
The plot zigs and zags, every time Ingrid thinks she might escape, something happens to keep her there. All the twists kept me wondering what might happen next, were Ingrid and Susan at risk? Hopefully the darkness is behind them and when Ingrid next returns to Scotland it’s for happier reasons. But probably not!
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 