Mara is the daughter of spiritualists. Her childhood was filled with seances, scam mediums and talk of ghostly presences.

When Mara finally left her family’s home, she vowed she would never allow superstition or false religion into her life again. Now she’s ready to start over with her fiance, Neil, in a world based on rationality and facts.

But her past isn’t ready to let her go just yet.

Mara and Neil purchase Blackwood House, a derelict property outside of town. They’re warned about strange occurrences in the crumbling building. Doors open by themselves, voices whisper in the night, bloody handprints appear on the walls, and cold spots linger in the basement, where the house’s original owner was murdered.

But Blackwood was dirt-cheap and came with a large plot of overgrown land. Mara loves her new home, and disregards the warnings.

I love myself a good haunted house book and it seems Darcy Coates has been loving the genre. I first read The Haunting of Ashburn House and then The Haunting of Leigh Harker and even The Folcroft Ghosts. This one follows the same formula with a bit of a twist. An old house with a very low price attracts a first time buyer – with one issue: the house appears to be haunted. She and her boyfriend move in and start modernising it, but strange things happen and she finds out her grandfather owned the house sometimes in the past.

The story is dull and slow moving and I zoned out in a few spots and had to actively re-engage to try to figure out what was going wrong. Mara, the main character, sounds insufferable and her boyfriend’s character is paper-thin.

 She has no electricity in her new house, and her phone battery goes dead.

“Then she looked at her phone and saw, to her horror, she hadn’t been hung up on after all. Her battery had died.”

Instead of asking her boyfriend, Neil, to charge it in his car, or maybe take it to work or to his house to charge it, she just doesn’t tell him about it. She doesn’t want to worry him, and she doesn’t want to rely on him for anything. I mean anything. The slightest little thing he tries to buy her or help her with, and she flies off the handle at him.

Like he buys her a new sofa and he knows she won’t accept give-aways so he tells her he found it at the side of the road to encourage her to accept it. Just say yes woman, and let him help out as he clearly wants to!

The last part of the book was a bit fun! I liked it and that’s why the 3 stars.

Hate and love danced a violent tango inside of her. She wished he were dead. She wanted to see him smile again. She craved his suffering. She wanted him to hold her and kiss her and tell her everything was all right