The Gallagher family has called Deeprath Castle home for seven hundred years.

Woven throughout with Irish history, this is a fascinating story full of likable characters as well as satisfyingly haunting ghosts of the past.Three generations of Irish nobles face their family secrets in this spellbinding novel from the award-winning author of the Boleyn King trilogy. Award-winning author Laura Andersen has done a masterful job of blending three time periods (the late 1800s, the lives of Lily and Cillian, and the present) into a story of mystery, myth, truth, and treachery. This makes her all the more determined to investigate, along with the handsome Aiden, to whom she is strongly attracted. A painting of the Darkling Bride that hangs in her room mysteriously moves from the wall to her bed, then clothing is slashed, and finally her papers and laptop are destroyed. But it appears someone or something-Carragh swears the castle talks to her-doesn’t want anyone snooping.

At the same time, the police have reopened the 1990s cold case of the deaths of Lily and Cillian. Murder-suicide? A double murder? A robbery gone wrong? (There are precious artifacts missing from the library.) Over the last 20-plus years the case has gone cold.Ĭarragh finds herself enthralled with the library and intrigued with the family’s three mysterious deaths. Seems Aiden discovered the bodies of his father, Cillian, and his mother, Lily, when he was only ten years old.

Soon after her arrival, Carragh learns of two significant events: the apparent suicide of Lady Jenny Gallagher, who was found at the foot of the Bride’s Tower in the 1800s, and the mysterious murders of Aiden and Kayla’s parents. Their plan is to endow the castle to a public trust, thus the inventory of the library. Now, in 2015, the family, including Aiden Gallagher, his sister Kyla, and their aunt Nessa who raised them after their parents’ death, have arrived at Deeprath. Located in the Irish countryside near Dublin, the brooding Gothic castle has been in the Gallagher family for 700 years. Carragh Ryan has always had a fascination with Irish folklore and is thrilled to be hired to catalog the extensive library of Deeprath Castle, home to the myth of the Darkling Bride, a beautiful ghost said to haunt its halls.

The Darkling Bride by Laura Andersen