The Haunted Garden: Secret of the Memento Mori

By Alyne de Winter

What if you were not who you thought you were, and in another place and time?
1666: The Black Death stalks a tiny village in Middle England, laying waste the population
1966: Love lorn art student, Simon Beaumont, goes on walkabout in the Pennine Mountains to die.
Instead, he discovers a ruined garden in a remote village haunted by ghosts, especially that of a beautiful girl in a long white dress who seems know him.
Simon meets an enigmatic woman, Lara, who lives in a ruined castle at the edge of the village. She initiates Simon into the history of the village and the story of a mysterious girl, Suzanne de Montmorency, who stayed in the village when everyone else had fled the arrival of the Black Death. Why did she stay? And what is the mystery of a macabre wedding portrait sent from France just before the plague? ANd why Suzanne's soul not been able to rest for three hundred years?

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Alyne de Winter
• Release date: Oct 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311352323

Alyne de Winter

Alyne de Winter is an author of Gothic Mysteries and Occult Thrillers featuring tormented beauties, eerie settings, night religions, secret histories... After years of drawing and painting, by a fluke ended up as an English major. She wrote and published award-winning poetry but always wanted to write fiction. The stories did not come to her until she went to Europe, then they flooded in and still haven't stopped. She loves the tradition of the writer establishing themselves with short stories while building the novels, so you will find many short stories on her page. The short story requires intensity of focus, economy of language (so every word must be effective) and must keep the plot lines tight. She likes to think of the short story as poetry's second cousin. Major influences: Grimms' Fairy Tales, Complete Works of Shakespeare, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Daphne du Maurier,Charles Dickins, Anne Rice, Theophile Gautier, Edgar Allen Poe, the films of Barbara Steele and other 1960s horror films. (Not a gore fan) Religion, History, costume, Ancient dance and folk cultures, and witchcraft. The Gothic novel has always been a love letter to the past, a grieving for lost beauty and an elegy to the soul.

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