House at River’s Bend, 1st published 1975

Jo Anne Dodson arrived at the old mansion at River’s Bend with a great feeling of exhilaration. Just a few weeks earlier she had learned that she had a grandfather that had been a wealthy eccentric, and that his entire estate was now hers. Her excitement was wearing off—now that she had spent a few hours in the strange old house—and was slowly being replaced with fear. Seeing the spirit—the lost soul—of a dead girl dragging along a blanket dripping with blood . . . learning that her bloodline had been afflicted with madness that was perhaps hereditary . . . and wondering about the intentions of the handsome man that claimed to be a writer but might have dark motivations . . . all combined to heighten her anxiety and sense of impending doom. If only Jo Anne had sooner recognized that her grandfather’s will was a letter of introduction to a deep-rooted evil, a vicious whirlpool that now had her in its grip . . .

Category: eBooks Tag: Gothic Romance

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Jo Anne had spent her entire life in the city. Then she inherited an old house that her great-grandfather built. It is eleven miles from anywhere, perched on a cliff overlooking the river. The house has been empty for 20 years. Dan, a lawyer and real estate agent, had traced her father from an orphanage to establish the ownership link. Jo Anne arrives feeling like Cinderella. Almost immediately Jo Anne meets Loren, a very attractive man that lives in a pickup camper on the river. It quickly develops that Loren and Dan are vying for Jo’s attention. Dan and his father had also arranged for Mrs. Alcorn—a cook and housekeeper—to move in and begin helping Jo Anne. In no time at all, Dan is proposing marriage and acting jealously towards Loren. Loren finds an old letter and brings it to Jo Anne. The letter indicates that there were complex relationships in the family that lived in the house almost 75 year earlier, and that perhaps there is a hereditary mental illness. Of two girls that were born on the same day in 1880, Jo Anne deduces that one of the girls killed the other, then took her baby and ran away. Then, Jo Anne wakes from a dream hearing and seeing things that are deeply disturbing . . . and seem to be related to the baby and her mother from many years ago.