Books

The North Atlantic, 14 April 1912. Amid the chaos of the sinking Titanic, a young Eleanor Annenberg meets the eyes of a stranger and is immediately captivated. As the ship buckles around them, she follows him down to the hold and finds him leaning over an open sarcophagus surrounded by mutilated bodies. She catches but a glimpse of what lies within before she’s sucked into a maelstrom of freezing brine and half-devoured corpses. Elle is pulled out of the water, but the stranger – and the secrets she stumbled upon – are lost.

Unintentionally, however, he leaves her a gift. One so compelling that Elle embarks on a journey that will take her across continents and consume decades of her life, to find the man who saved her that fateful night and learn the truth behind the horrors she witnessed. Elle follows a trail long gone cold to discover a shattered soul living on the fringes of humanity and, along the way, is pulled into a world of terrifying ancient evils, of vicious hunters and human prey. 

From trench warfare at Cape Helles in 1915 to a shipwreck in the tropical shallows off the Honduran coast, and from a lost mine beneath the towering Externsteine in a Germany on the verge of war to the gothic crypts of Highgate Cemetery in London, Elle gets closer to a truth she has sought for most of her life. But at what cost? 

Gifts, after all, are seldom free.