When Cassie Graves discovers her husband’s affair, it’s enough to chip away at the foundation of her life. But after researching her family’s Italian ancestry, it completely crumbles beneath her. Her grandmother Gia’s often-told stories about the past are a lie. Her much-romanticized great-grandfather, Giovanni, may not even have existed. Most alarming of all, it appears her mysterious great-grandmother, Violetta, died by stregoneria --- witchcraft. Now, piecing together the puzzle of her family tree in the small, centuries-old hill town of Santo Stefano, Cassie finds help from a welcoming group of locals. When she comes upon an old spell book, she gets closer to unearthing long-buried family secrets, the truth about a powerful female lineage, and the haunting discovery of who she really is.

In the tourist town of Wharton, on the coast of Lake Superior, Tess Bell is renovating her old family home into a bed-and-breakfast during the icy dead of winter. As the house’s restoration commences, a shuttered art studio is revealed. Inside are paintings Tess’ late grandfather, beloved and celebrated artist Sebastian Bell, hid away for generations. But these appear to be the works of a twisted mind, almost unrecognizable as paintings she and others familiar with his art would expect. The sinister canvases raise disturbing questions for Tess, sparking nightmares and igniting in her an obsession to unearth the truth around their origins. What evil has been locked away for so many years?

In Metsan Valo, her family home on Lake Superior, Anni Halla’s beloved grandmother has died. Among her fond memories, what Anni remembers most vividly is her grandmother’s eerie yet enchanting storytelling. The reading of the will now occasions a family reunion. Whispers wind through the woods. Laughter bursts from bubbling streams. Raps from unseen hands rupture on the walls. Fireflies swarm and nightmares stir. With each odd occurrence, Anni fears that her return has invited less a welcoming and more a warning. When another tragedy strikes near home, Anni must dive headfirst into the mysterious happenings to discover the truth about her home, her family and the wooded island’s ancient lore.

After a devastating loss, Brynn Wilder escapes to Wharton, a tourist town on Lake Superior, to reset. Checking into a quaint boardinghouse for the summer, she hopes to put her life into perspective. In her fellow lodgers, she finds a friendly company of strangers. But in this inviting refuge, where a century of souls has passed, a mystery begins to swirl. The frail Alice knows things about Brynn, about all of them, that she shouldn’t. Bad dreams and night whispers lure Brynn to a shuttered room at the end of the hall, a room still heavy with a recent death. And now she’s become irresistibly drawn to Dominic --- even in the shadow of rumors that wherever this unsettlingly handsome man goes, suspicious death follows.

After the end of her marriage, Kate Granger has retreated to her parents’ home on Lake Superior to pull herself together --- only to discover the body of a murdered woman washed into the shallows. Tucked in the folds of the woman’s curiously vintage gown is an infant, as cold and at peace as its mother. Only Kate can identify the woman, who she has seen before in her dreams. One hundred years ago, a love story ended in tragedy, its mysteries left unsolved. As the drowned woman reaches out from the grave, Kate reaches back. They must come together, if only in dreams, to right the sinister wrongs of the past.

When Eleanor Harper becomes the director of a renowned artists’ retreat, she knows nothing of Cliffside Manor’s dark past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, a “waiting room for death.” After years of covering murder and violence as a crime reporter, she hopes that being around artists and writers in this new job will be a peaceful retreat for her as much as for them. But from her first fog-filled moments on the manor’s grounds, Eleanor is seized by a sense of impending doom and realizes there’s more to the institution than its reputation of being a haven for creativity. As the chilling mysteries of Cliffside Manor unravel and the eerie sins of the past are exposed, she must fight to save the new fellows --- and herself --- from sinister forces.

Just as Julia Bishop’s life is collapsing around her, a stranger appears on her doorstep with an intriguing job offer --- he asks Julia to be a companion for his elderly mother, the famous and rather eccentric horror novelist Amaris Sinclair, whom Julia has always admired...and who the whole world thinks is dead. Julia jumps at the chance for a fresh start. But when she arrives at Havenwood, the Sinclairs’ magnificent, centuries-old estate in the middle of the wilderness near Lake Superior, she begins to suspect her too-good-to-be-true job offer is exactly that.