Dark romance has its own vocabulary of tropes, each offering a different shade of intensity. Here is your guide to understanding what each trope means and what reading experience it delivers. Possessive Hero A love interest whose protectiveness borders on obsession. The appeal: being valued so intensely that someone would do anything to keep you … Read more
1 min readThe cauldron was found in a bog in County Roscommon by a farmer named Paddy Coyle, who was digging drainage ditches and expecting to find nothing more interesting than the usual complement of waterlogged timber and Bronze Age butter. What he found instead was a vessel of hammered bronze, three feet across, decorated with figures … Read more
9 min readThe holy well of Tobernalt had been kept by the Gallagher women for as long as memory could reach, and longer. It was a small, unassuming thing — a stone basin in a wooded hollow above the shores of Lough Gill, fed by a spring that rose from the limestone with the steady, cold persistence … Read more
9 min readThe gallery opening was by invitation only, which in the art world of contemporary London meant that approximately four hundred people had been invited, of whom three hundred had come for the free champagne, ninety-seven had come to be seen, and exactly three had come for the art. Mira Castellano was one of the three. … Read more
9 min readDr. Celestine Moreau had spent twelve years studying death. As the head conservator of the Mortuary Archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, she catalogued the documents that the living preferred to forget: autopsy reports from the Terror, plague registries from the fourteenth century, the meticulous death certificates of the Napoleonic wars. She worked in … Read more
9 min readThe map arrived on the morning of the winter solstice, wrapped in oilskin that smelled of centuries and sealed with wax the colour of an old bruise. Dr. Linnea Strand found it wedged beneath the door of her office at the Blackmore Institute for Cartographic Studies, which was itself wedged into a narrow Georgian building … Read more
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