Showing results by author "Shani Struthers" in All Categories

Eleven stories chronicle the life and times of characters who cross paths and share destiny’s fire escape. Ghosts, gravity, romance, and secrets weave the communal narrative. Step into the elevator. Push any button, but try to remember your way back out. Not everybody makes it.

Based in Lewes, East Sussex, Ruby and her team of freelance psychics have been kept busy. Specializing in domestic cases, their solid reputation is spreading - it's not just the dead that can rest in peace but the living too. All is threatened when Ruby receives a call from the irate new owner of Highdown Hall. Film star Cynthia Hart is still in residence, despite having died in 1958. Winter deepens and so does the mystery surrounding Cynthia. She insists the devil is blocking her path to the light long after Psychic Surveys have 'disproved' it.

Eighteen years ago, when psychic Ruby Davis was a child, her mother - also a psychic - suffered a nervous breakdown. Ruby was never told why. "It won't help you to know," was the only answer she was ever given. Fast forward to the present and Ruby is earning a living from her gift, running a high street consultancy - Psychic Surveys - specialising in domestic spiritual clearance. Boasting a strong track record, business is booming. Dealing with spirits has become routine, but there is more to the paranormal than even Ruby can imagine.

It is the sixth century. The Romans have been gone for over 100 years, and Britannia is sinking into darkness. Kingdoms clash, and invaders flood the shores – the Jutes, the Angles, and now the bloodthirsty Saxons. Only Uther Pendragon has kept the West safe, defying, too, the rising tide of Christianity. But now, Uther is dead. And if the West falls, all of Britannia will follow. Deep in a secluded valley, hidden from the world, Arthur and Morgan have grown to adulthood under the care of their foster parents.

Jessica Lockhart is in need of a live-in carer over the Christmas period; Isla Barrow is the woman who takes the job. After a fraught journey to reach her along remote country lanes, Isla arrives to find the old woman in distress, and the house strangely unnerving. With the weather hostile, no phone line or mobile signal, and her charge growing increasingly frail, Isla realizes death is waiting. And something else besides: vengeance.

Although this is book four in the Psychic Surveys series, and some series elements continue, it can also be read as a standalone. It's not wise to linger at the crossroads... In a quiet Dorset Village, Old Cross Cottage has stood for centuries, overlooking the place where four roads meet. Marred by tragedy, it's had a series of residents, none of whom have stayed for long. Pink and pretty, with a thatched roof, it should be an ideal retreat, but as new owners Rachel and Mark Bell discover, it's anything but.

Devastated by the deaths of her parents and disillusioned with life, Caroline Daynes is in America trying to connect with their memory. Travelling to her mother's hometown of Williamsfield in Pennsylvania, she is caught in a snowstorm and forced to stop at The Egress hotel - somewhere she'd planned to visit as her parents honeymooned there. From the moment she sets foot inside the lobby and meets the surly receptionist, she realizes this is a hotel like no other. Charming and unique, it seems lost in time with a whole cast of compelling characters sheltering behind closed doors.

What if evil won't let go? Along a sheltered lane, deep in the Sussex countryside, sits a house that is sometimes called home, the tenants it has held unable to forget it. When Ruby Davis gets a distressed call from Rosie Cowell, the latest inhabitant, little does she know that her life too will change forever, from the moment she steps over the threshold.

Brookbridge housing estate has long been a source of work for Psychic Surveys. Formerly the site of a notorious mental hospital, Ruby and her team have had to deal with spirits manifesting in people’s homes, still trapped in the cold grey walls of the asylum they once inhabited. There have been plenty of traumatic cases but never a mass case – until now. The last remaining hospital block is due to be pulled down. It is a building teeming with spirits of the most resistant kind - the institutionalized.

Heavily pregnant, Ruby Davis has handed over the reins of her psychic business to Corinna, Theo, and Ness, who all lament the loss of her leadership. Corinna, at the helm, is determined to keep up their brilliant track record, with case after case continuing to come in. But something has caught her attention. Not a case, exactly, but a dark local mystery.

Ruby Davis runs Psychic Surveys, a high street company specializing in domestic spiritual clearance. Having inherited her ability to see beyond the veil that separates this world and the next from her mother Jessica, she is busy helping grounded spirits to cross the great divide. In turn, Jessica inherited her gift from her mother Sarah, and Sarah from Rosamund.

In 1977, Minch Point Lighthouse on Skye's most westerly tip was suddenly abandoned by the keeper and his family - no reason ever found. In the decade that followed, it became a haunt for teenagers on the hunt for thrills. In 1987, following her success working on a case with Sussex Police, 25-year-old psychic Ness Patterson is asked to investigate recent happenings at the lighthouse. Local teen Ally Dunn has suffered a breakdown following time spent there and is refusing to speak to anyone.

We all have to face our demons at some point. Psychic Surveys - specialists in domestic spiritual clearance - have never been busier. Two cases prove trying: 44 Gilmore Street, home to a particularly violent spirit, and the reincarnation case of Elisha Grey. The ghost of Gilmore Street inflames public imagination, but as Ruby and the team fail repeatedly to evict the entity, faith in them wavers. It seems some demons just won't let go....

Their troubled past behind them, married couple, Rob and Louise, visit Venice for the first time together, looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Not just a romantic destination, it's also the most haunted city in the world and soon, Louise finds herself the focus of an entity she can't quite get to grips with - a veiled lady who stalks her.

Life may have moved on to new challenges for Ruby Davis, now being a mother to baby Hendrix, but she's back at the helm of Psychic Surveys, her spiritual domestic clearance company, and the cases just keep getting stranger. A new client, Carrie-Ann Kendall, has suffered an accident at sea, one that - according to her - she shouldn't have survived. Visiting a clairvoyant who is apparently terrified by her presence, only confirms this notion. It is now up to Ruby and the team to find out whether Carrie-Ann has cheated death. If so, what are the consequences, and for how long?

An extreme land breeds extreme emotions. Comraich - Gaelic for Sanctuary - that's what this ancient fortress of a house in the Highlands of Scotland has offered its generations, a haven from the world beyond. The nesting instinct kicking in, a pregnant Jessamin decides that Comraich, which she shares with her partner Fionnlagh Maccaillin, needs refreshing. Getting to work in one of the spare bedrooms she makes a startling discovery, one that pulls her into a world of the intense and disturbing passions of others that have been here before.

Jessamin Wade's husband is dead. She keeps him alive in her imagination, but she thinks she will hear him better if she goes somewhere quieter. Her destination is Glenelk in the Highlands of Scotland. Quickly, she meets the locals: her landlord, Fionnlagh Maccaillin; Maggie, who runs the village shop; and Stan, a frail, old man stricken with grief. Their lives entwining in mysterious ways, can they help each other to move on, or will they always belong to the ghosts that haunt them?

In 1899, in the North Yorkshire market town of Thorpe Morton, a tragedy occurred; 59 people died at the market hall whilst celebrating Christmas Eve, many of them children. One hundred years on and the spirits of the deceased are restless still, 'haunting' the community, refusing to let them forget. In 1999, psychic investigators Theo Lawson and Ness Patterson are called in to help, sensing immediately on arrival how weighed down the town is. Quickly they discover there's no safe haven. The past taints everything.

After her parents' divorce, five-year old Corinna Greer moves into Blakemort with her mother and brother. Set on the edge of the village of Whitesmith, the only thing attractive about it is the rent. A 'sensitive', Corinna is aware from the start that something is wrong with the house. Very wrong. Christmas is coming but at Blakemort that's not something to get excited about. A house that sits and broods, that calculates and considers, it's then that it lashes out - the attacks endured over five years becoming worse.

Beth Williams leads a lonely existence, going to work, then returning to her flat to watch TV, eat, and sleep – the same routine on repeat, day after day. It’s a loneliness she nurtures, finds comfort in, even, except at Christmas, a time of dread. Then comes an invite, an offer from an old friend, to join him for "The Damned Season" at his house on an island off the coast of Anglesey, for Christmas with a difference. Intrigued as well as desperate, Beth accepts, arriving there a few days before Christmas Eve.