The Darkness Surrounds Us

“A taut gothic mystery with an intriguing twist.” —Susanna Calkins, award-winning author of the Lucy Campion Mysteries and the Speakeasy Murders

A Ghostly Window Into the Past

Nurse Nellie Lester can’t escape death. Fleeing Chicago at the height of the 1918 Spanish flu, she takes a nursing job at a decrepit mansion on a desolate Michigan island. She’s convinced the island holds the secret to her mother’s murky past. The only problem? Her dead mother seems to have followed her there. Nightly she’s haunted by a ghostly presence that appears in her bedroom. But is it her mother or something more sinister?

When the frozen body of the prior nurse is unearthed, Nellie suspects her family’s history and the nurse’s uncanny death are connected to a mysterious group that disappeared from the island twenty-four years earlier.

As winter closes in, past and present collide resurrecting a lurid killer, hell-bent on keeping the island’s secrets. Will Nellie uncover her mother’s shocking past before the killer enacts his final revenge?

“Lukasik blends all the elements needed for a dark suspense novel: a forbidding mansion, ghostly presences, secret passages, a hostile housekeeper, a temperamental employer, and residents unwilling to talk to outsiders. For fans of Rebecca, The Woman in White, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway.” —Library Journal