The Death of Jane Lawrence

When Jane Shoringfield proposes a marriage of convenience to the brooding, reclusive surgeon Augustine Lawrence, she expects a practical arrangement — companionship on paper, independence in practice. What she doesn't expect is the one condition he insists upon with cold, unsettling certainty: she must never set foot in Lindridge Hall, his decaying ancestral manor beyond the town's edge.

Jane agrees. Jane is practical, after all.

But on their very wedding night, a violent storm strands her at Lindridge Hall's crumbling threshold, and what she discovers inside — Augustine surrounded by blood, shadows, and something that should not exist — shatters every careful calculation she has ever made.

Set in a richly imagined world that sits at the crossroads of gothic horror and dark fantasy, *The Death of Jane Lawrence* is a bone-chilling, viscerally romantic novel about two people locked in a tension that is equal parts repulsion and desperate, dangerous attraction. Augustine is cold, haunted, and hiding horrors Jane can barely name. Jane is stubborn, brilliant, and refuses to look away from the truth, no matter how monstrous it becomes. Their push-and-pull crackles with a charged animosity that slowly, terrifyingly, transforms into something neither of them can control.

Longlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, this ALA Reading List Best Horror pick is a love story wrapped in surgical precision and nightmare logic — and once it gets under your skin, it does not let go.