Showing results by author "Shani Struthers" in All Categories

After suffering the tragic loss of her best friend, Lottie Beck is struggling. Aged eighteen, she's flunked school and spends her days lying in a darkened room, doing nothing. Finally, she is forced to get a job in Silver Birches Care Home. Once there, and after meeting the residents, particularly the feisty, no-nonsense Bobby, she settles in, appreciating how much history lies behind each person. A history she can read, in her own special way, via the simple touch of a hand.

Based in Lewes, East Sussex, Ruby and her team of freelance psychics have been kept busy. Specializing 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.

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. 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.

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.

Although this is book four in the Psychic Surveys series, and some series elements continue, it can also be read as a standalone. 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.

Jessica Lockhart is in need of a live-in carer over the Christmas period; Isla Barrow is the woman who takes the job. After a fraught journey to reach her along remote country lanes, Isla arrives to find the old woman in distress, and the house strangely unnerving. With the weather hostile, no phone line or mobile signal, and her charge growing increasingly frail, Isla realizes death is waiting. And something else besides: vengeance.

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 have been plenty of traumatic cases but never a mass case – until now. The last remaining hospital block is due to be pulled down. It is a building teeming with spirits of the most resistant kind - the institutionalized.

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," was the only answer she was 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.

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.

We all have to face our demons at some point. Psychic Surveys - specialists in domestic spiritual clearance - have never been busier. Two cases prove trying: 44 Gilmore Street, home to a particularly violent spirit, and the reincarnation case of Elisha Grey. The ghost of Gilmore Street inflames public imagination, but as Ruby and the team fail repeatedly to evict the entity, faith in them wavers. It seems some demons just won't let go....

Jessamin Wade's husband is dead. She keeps him alive in her imagination, but she thinks she will hear him better if she goes somewhere quieter. Her destination is Glenelk in the Highlands of Scotland. Quickly, she meets the locals: her landlord, Fionnlagh Maccaillin; Maggie, who runs the village shop; and Stan, a frail, old man stricken with grief. Their lives entwining in mysterious ways, can they help each other to move on, or will they always belong to the ghosts that haunt them?

Although Psychic Surveys remain busy, there’s been no real cases lately to get their teeth into, logical explanations found for most hauntings. That all changes when Ruby gets a call from Conor Byrne, who lives in the Republic of Ireland. The fear in his voice is genuine. Ruby, Theo, Ness and Corinna head over to the Emerald Isle to help Conor, and, of course, the distressed spirit – their aim to bring peace to the living and the dead. They arrive to find a dilapidated cottage in a rural area, and a man that’s barely alive.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 realizes what she’s been missing and quickly falls in love. Suddenly, it is the business of living that interests her.

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.

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.

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.