The Keeping Place: a Small-Town Paranormal Romance of Secrets, Survival, and Love That Could Get Them Both Killed

Some towns keep their secrets in locked rooms. Mercy's Bend keeps them in the dead. Wren Talvik has lived her whole life in a town where the dead never fully leave. She knows their names. She knows their faces. She knows exactly where each one stands at the tree line every dusk - patient, silent, bound to Mercy's Bend by a pact older than the town itself. She also knows what she is. A Keeper. The only person in Mercy's Bend who can speak to the dead, release them from their debt, and - if the town council ever finds out she's been hiding it - forfeit her life to the wall in their place. For four years, Wren has kept that secret the way she keeps everything: quietly, carefully, and completely alone. >Jos left Mercy's Bend at nineteen and spent fifteen years building a life that had nothing to do with ghost walls, founding family bloodlines, or the particular way the fog moves wrong in the fjord at night. He came back for an estate. A sealed letter. A month, at most. He didn't come back for Wren Talvik. But the town has its own logic, and its own timing, and the land Jos just inherited is the one piece of Mercy's Bend the wall doesn't fully cover - which means something has already noticed he's home. >They don't trust each other. They have every reason not to. Jos carries a bloodline that could have Wren reclaimed by the council before the week is out. Wren carries a secret that could get them both killed. Between them sits a history neither of them made and both of them are about to inherit. But Mercy's Bend is tightening. The ghost wall is losing threads. The council is running out of patience. And the thing the pact was built to hold back - the thing nobody in a hundred years has dared name out loud - isn't what everyone believes it to be. >Some secrets keep you safe. Some secrets keep you prisoner. In Mercy's Bend, the difference is already decided before you know which one you're holding. The Keeping Place is a slow-burn paranormal romance for readers who want their love stories earned and their ghost stories real. Set in the fog-wrapped fjords of coastal British Columbia, it is a novel about what we owe the dead, what the living owe each other, and the particular courage it takes to tell the truth to the one person who could use it to destroy you. Perfect for fans of dark small-town romance, atmospheric supernatural fiction, and love-hate tension that builds until something has to give.

Pagina's: 146, Paperback, Independently published