The Golden Key

Description

An extraordinary, page-turning Gothic mystery set in the wilds of the Norfolk Fens from a BSFA-shortlisted author London, 1901. After the death of Queen Victoria the city heaves with the uncanny and the eerie. Seances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms. Samuel Moncrieff, recovering from a recent tragedy of his own, meets Helena Walton-Cisneros, one of London's most reputed mediums. But Helena is not what she seems and she's enlisted by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens. But the Fens are a liminal land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. With locals that speak of devil-men and catatonic children found on the Broads, Helena finds the answer to the mystery leads back to where it started: Samuel Moncrieff.

Marian Womack, author of "The Golden Key" and "The Swimmers", was born in Andalusia and educated in the UK. Her debut short story collection, "Lost Objects" (Luna Press, 2018) was shortlisted for two BSFA awards and one BFA award. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, and she holds degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities. She writes at the intersection between weird and gothic fiction, and her stories normally deal with strange landscapes, ghostly encounters, or uncanny transformations. Marian lives in Cambridge, at the edge of the Fens, with her husband, their children and two aging Spanish cats. When she is not writing she can be found working as an academic librarian, or editing books and pamphlets in her indie publishing project, Calque Press.

"An intriguing and unsettling tale of seances, strange lights, disappearing children and a poacher who swears he has seen the devil in the marshes . . . Womack brings a great sense of the uncanny to the Fens." Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season