Sharing a picturesque set of rooms with the flamboyant and beautiful April Clarke-Cliveden, she divides her time between rigorous studying and energetic socializing with Emily Lippmana, Ryan Coates, Hugh Bland, and Will de Chastaigne, with whom she shares an attraction even though he's April’s boyfriend. Hannah Jones arrives at Oxford hardly believing that she’s been accepted into this haven of learning and wealth. Ten years after having discovered her Oxford roommate’s dead body in front of the fireplace in their room, a young woman struggles with the realization that she may have helped send the wrong man to prison. In a desperate attempt to rescue her child, she uses every bit of remaining strength and wit to escape Lilydale.īased on a true story, this is a sinister, suspenseful thriller full of creeping horror. She awakens bloody and in pain and without her baby. Realizing that the only way she may ever learn the truth about the town’s strange past and disturbing present is by pretending to be docile, she’s still outsmarted by the cultish group, which forces her to give birth at home. Her paranoia about the way she’s treated and the things she’s learning makes even Ursula, her college roommate and best friend, think she needs help. As she investigates, she feels constantly watched and reported on by the Mill Street gang and quickly learns she can trust no one. Desperate for a job, she gets one on the small local paper, which sends her out to do the usual puff pieces, and finds herself intrigued by a story about a little boy who vanished from school in 1944 and was never found-and the man who's just shown up in town claiming to be that boy.

Accustomed to big-city living, Joan immediately feels smothered and uneasy with the attention she gets from the townspeople, who seem unusually delighted with a pregnancy she hadn’t wanted to reveal yet. Deck’s parents and their friends on Mill Street welcome the couple with joy, installing them in Deck’s childhood home. Lourey returns to the Minnesota town of Lilydale, whose perfect exterior hides a seething mass of horror.Īfter she’s mugged, pregnant reporter Joan Harken agrees to move from Minneapolis to her fiance Deck Schmidt’s hometown both for her own safety and to save Deck from the military draft that’s claimed so many other men in 1968.

Bloodline by Jess Lourey