If you like romantic suspense infused with Gothic themes, you’ve come to the right place.
Gothics were the first romantic suspense novels and are a wonderful vehicle for stories where things long past impinge on the living. Ancient buildings, half-remembered legends and secrets. Lots of secrets.
The picture is above is of Cordes-sur-Ciel in south-west France. The hilltop town was built in 1222 as a refuge for the heretic Cathars, fleeing the ferocity of the Church’s only crusade to take place on European soil. Did those desperate people bring more with them than their beliefs about good and evil? What secrets from those times still linger within the town’s massive ringwalls, and what do the many symbols carved by local craftsmen into its stone buildings really mean?
Cordes today is the most romantic place imaginable, and its remarkably well preserved medieval streets throng with visitors. Nevertheless, to climb the steep, cobbled lanes up to Place de la Bride for a view across the serene Cerou Valley is to take a strange journey through time, where sunny romance and holidays are braided with the half glimpsed dark of the distant past.
You can find out more about the first two books in my “Echoes of the Cathars” series on My Books page.