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The House of Ashes Kindle Edition
Sara Keane’s husband, Damien, has uprooted them from England and moved them to his native Northern Ireland for a “fresh start” in the wake of her nervous breakdown. Sara, who knows no one in Northern Ireland, is jobless, carless, friendless—all but a prisoner in her own house. When a blood-soaked old woman beats on the door, insisting the house is hers before being bundled back to her care facility, Sara begins to understand the house has a terrible history her husband never intended for her to discover. As the two women form a bond over their shared traumas, Sara finds the strength to stand up to her abuser, and Mary—silent for six decades—is finally ready to tell her story . . .
Through the counterpoint voices—one modern Englishwoman, one Northern Irish farmgirl speaking from half a century earlier—Stuart Neville offers a chilling and gorgeous portrait of violence and resilience in this truly haunting narrative.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSoho Crime
- Publication dateSeptember 7, 2021
- File size512 KB
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
Nominated for the 2022 Fingerprint Award for Genre-Busting Book of the Year
A CrimeReads Best Crime Novel of 2021
CrimeReads Most Anticipated Crime Fiction of Fall
“Chilling, compassionate and compelling, Stuart Neville takes us straight to the dark heart of rural Ireland.”
—Val McDermid
“A brilliant, atmospheric novel from Stuart Neville that plays with chronology and the idea that evil can linger in the dark places. Neville writes with care and empathy and his characters will stay with you for a long time. In a storied career, this may well be Stuart Neville's best book.”
—Adrian McKinty, bestselling author of The Cold Cold Ground
“Moving, thrilling, tragic. The House of Ashes is a phenomenal achievement from a crime fiction Titan.”
—Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End
“A gripping mystery with a soupçon of the supernatural . . . Neville fuses a heartbreaking story of domestic abuse with a tightly written thriller in The House of Ashes.”
—Oline H. Cogdill, Shelf Awareness
“Neville has been known for his beautifully written Northern Irish noir. But with The House of Ashes, while the writing is still beautiful, Neville’s subject is men[’s] mistreatment of women—including murder—and women who find the courage to stand up . . . A remarkable, if troubling, work about resilience and justice.”
—Jack Batten, The Toronto Star
“Stuart Neville writes crime fiction that is edgy, compelling and always deeply humane. This might well be his masterpiece.”
—Mark Billingham
“Spellbinding . . . Neville hooks his reader with the opening sequences of his story, mystery, and horror emerging prominently. The multi-narrative structure that plays out is effective and gripping. Impressive just begins to describe Neville’s latest offering.”
—Seattle Book Review
“In retrospect, Stuart Neville has perhaps been working towards the magnum opus that is The House of Ashes for his entire career — he started off with the kind of hard-boiled noir that’s not easily forgotten, then moved into domestic suspense just long enough to synthesize the dangers of domesticity with those of toxic sectarian conflict . . . Neville seamlessly blends gothic fiction, psychological thriller, and Northern Irish noir in his powerful new novel.”
—CrimeReads
“A stunning novel, brutal, disturbing and completely riveting . . . Life-endangering female resistance to misogyny is a recurrent theme in contemporary crime fiction, but The House of Ashes is one of the most vivid, moving and memorable treatments it has received.”
—Crime Culture
“[Stuart Neville] turns his focus to the domestic in this multigenerational study of an inviting house and the terrible secrets it hides . . . As The House of Ashes asserts, the greatest strength that one woman can offer another is to believe her. If one woman sees it or thinks it, it’s a hallucination or a pipe dream—but if two women can see the same thing, it’s a chance to live.”
—Tor Nightfire
“Seethes with agony and retribution. This is an excellent thriller that’s gruesome and hard to stomach, but completely believable.”
—Mystery & Suspense
“The House of Ashes is a well-executed thriller that grips the reader throughout . . . Neville furnishes a denouement, however, that packs a feminist punch.”
—Historical Novels Review
“Complete with a complement of Irish apparitions, the novel opens with tangible dread and moves to emotional devastation, intellectual fury and visceral satisfaction . . . The House of Ashes represents Neville at his imaginative and vigorous best.”
—The Free Lance-Star
“Stuart Neville offers a chilling and gorgeous portrait of violence and resilience in this truly haunting narrative . . . The stuff of which legendary film noir movies were made, The House of Ashes is a simply riveting read from first page to last.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Featuring supernatural and even gothic elements in a book fueled by female resilience, this is a huge departure for Neville, a risk that pays off quite handsomely . . . A story that is as moving and inspiring as it is terrifying.”
—BookReporter.com
“An absorbing read, one that is difficult to put down and hard to forget.”
—Reviewing the Evidence
“This hardboiled thriller paints a shattering image of how absolute power becomes absolute control . . . [The House of Ashes] is a work of psychological horror, drenched in blood, death, and sexual abuse . . . The terrors revealed and persisting match the book against such classics as Silence of the Lambs.”
—Kingdom Books
“A disquieting novel that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go.”
—Feathered Quill
“Stuart Neville is truly the master of Irish noir. His latest mystery, The House of Ashes, is his best novel since his haunting debut, The Ghosts of Belfast.”
—Gumshoe Review
“Fans of the superhit film franchise, The Conjuring, will love [The House of Ashes] . . . The House of Ashes is a very creepy, fast-paced, highly intriguing horror mystery that is rife with human suffering and grief.”
—SF Revu
“[A] gut-wrenching novel of psychological suspense with ghostly undertones . . . This unforgettable tale of servitude and subservience, domestic abuse, and toxic masculinity builds to a resolution offering redemption and heartfelt solace. Neville has outdone himself.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“This psychological thriller is not for the fainthearted.”
—Library Journal
“[The House of Ashes] will keep you turning the pages.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Stuart Neville
“Noir, noir, noir—everybody wants to write noir fiction. But most self-anointed 'noir' narratives just don’t hack it. They’re dark and dreary, to be sure; but a true noir mystery must also have a black heart. This kind of spiritual despair comes naturally to Stuart Neville, whose Belfast crime novels bleed.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Tightly wound, emotionally resonant . . . Displays an acute understanding of the true state of Northern Ireland, still under the thumb of decades of violence.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The current master of neo-noir detective fiction.”
—The Boston Globe
“A great, brawling ache of a novel . . . filled with both prickling suspense and fiercely wrought emotion.”
—Megan Abbott
“In the world of modern crime fiction, Stuart Neville is a supernova.”
—Dennis Lehane
“The dread in this novel is palpable from the first pages until the heartbreaking final ones. It's Neville's best yet.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Superlative . . . A pulse-pounding crime novel from a master of the genre.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sara Keane was kneeling on the kitchen floor not long after six thirty in the morning, scrubbing the flagstones, when the old woman hammered on the front door.
The stains. The brownish-red stains that were so faint she couldn’t be sure they were there at all. Was this the third or fourth morning she had woken in the house? Time had become diaphanous, slipping by without her noticing. Days became weeks as she looked the other way, weeks turning to months before she knew they’d been lost to her.
She had not slept since they moved in. Not real sleep, not the warm dark that brings light, but the dim hinterland where bitter memories surfaced to torment her. Each morning, the chattering of birds outside the window banished the last hope of sleep before dawn. Each morning, she came downstairs in the milky-blue early light, passing the stacks of unpacked boxes.
The house had stood for more than a hundred and twenty years, so she was told. It rested behind a cluster of ash trees, taking its name from them: The Ashes, carved in one of the stone pillars at the gate. Her father-in-law, Francis—Francie, as he preferred—had found the house. Bought it for a song and gifted it to Sara and her husband Damien. A fire had left the place a shell, but it had been rebuilt. The original stone flooring remained intact, worn smooth by a century and more of footfall, dark and glossy like the skin of some ancient creature. It felt sinful to walk on it with bare feet, and all the better for it, the stone cooling her soles.
The first morning, however many days ago that was, Sara had come down here at dawn and made coffee while Damien snored upstairs. She noticed the stains over by the alcove that used to be a fireplace. An Aga cooker had been fitted where a wood-burning stove had once been. The stone in front of it was mottled with a deep red, as if something had spilled there years before. Clean it, she had thought. Damien would not tolerate mess. She had fetched a surface-cleaning wipe from a packet by the sink and got down on her knees. The stains seemed to fade as she rubbed the stone, though no residue was apparent on the wipe when she was done. Still, they were gone, and she thought no more about them until the following morning, when Damien was eating toast at the island in the centre of the room. She saw the stains, returned, as morning light brightened the kitchen.
“Look,” she had said, touching them with her bare toe, seeking a change in texture against her skin but finding none.
“Hmm?” He did not look up from his phone, one thumb scrolling while he sucked melted butter from the other.
“Those stains are back,” she said. “I cleaned them yesterday morning, and now they’ve come back.”
“Yeah?” He took another bite of toast, a sip of coffee, kept his eyes on the phone.
“Look,” she said, “here.”
Damien huffed out an impatient breath and put his slice of toast on the plate, leaned over on his stool, tilting his head one way, then the other.
“Here,” she said again, tapping the stain with her toe.
“I don’t see it. It’s just the pattern of the stone, no?”
Damien wore his good Hugo Boss jeans with a striped shirt tucked in at the waist, brown Grenson brogues, his Canali blazer on a hanger, suspended from a cupboard door. He was starting work today, the new in-house architect at his father’s property development firm.
Things had come together quickly after what had happened back home—she still thought of it as back home—in Bath. She had been raised there in the West Country of England, had met Damien at the University of Bath, he a postgrad architecture student, she in her second year of studying for a social work degree. She never imagined, even after they married, that she would come to live in the place he never ever called Northern Ireland. Always the North, the North of Ireland, sometimes the Six Counties, but never Northern Ireland. As if to speak its name would shame him. She accepted his reasons, even if she never fully understood them. Not that it mattered, she had thought, because they would never move there, not to that place. But then things went bad, she had come so close to that most wretched sin, and they had decided to start over. Here, where he came from.
And it all fell into place, just like that, as if some unknown god had been waiting for her to take the overdose, as if the job for Damien had been here all along, as if this house had been biding its time until their arrival.
“It’s there, look,” Sara said.
Damien pulled a sheet of kitchen paper from the roll on the island and wiped his hands clean before balling it up and leaving it by his plate. He reached for his jacket, slipped it on, and came to her side.
Looking down, he said, “No, I don’t see it. It’s just the colour of the stone.”
“No, it’s—”
“It’s your imagination. I need to get going. You’ll get some stuff unpacked, won’t you? I don’t want Da to be tripping over boxes when he comes round. You don’t want the place to be a tip, do you?”
Francie Keane was due to visit this week to see how the work on the house was coming along. The parts the electrician needed hadn’t turned up, and half the light switches remained uninstalled, clusters of wires snaking from the holes in the walls, ready to bite.
Damien didn’t wait for a response, and Sara heard the front door close as she toed the stain. When the sound of his car had receded, she went to the sink, filled the plastic basin with warm water and washing-up liquid, and took the dish scrubbing brush from the windowsill. On her knees, she cleaned the floor, the deep red blotches fading into the smooth darkness of the stone.
She knew they would come back.
This morning, as the world lightened, she had listened to the birds for a while before finally giving up on sleep. Some of their calls had become familiar, and she wondered what kinds they might be. Maybe she would buy a book, some sort of guide to the different breeds. Another item on the list of things she would do one day, when she got around to it.
Sara wore a light cardigan over her pyjamas when she tiptoed downstairs, always soft in her step so as not to wake Damien. He didn’t like being woken early, and he would be sullen and irritable for the rest of the day if she disturbed him. Half-a-dozen boxes remained in the hall, filled with books and DVDs and CDs, waiting for the joiner to shelve out the alcoves around the fireplace in the living room. None of them were hers. The hall’s chill was deepened by the darkness there with no switches yet fitted for the lights.
In the kitchen, Sara filled the kettle and flicked it on. When it had boiled, she warmed the cafetière—Damien insisted that it be warmed first—then spooned in the coffee grounds. As she allowed it to stand, she gazed out of the window over the sink, towards the front of the property. She watched the ash trees, looking for the birds she’d been listening to these last few mornings. Brown earth stretched away from either side of the driveway, dotted by green shoots of new grass, freshly seeded a few weeks ago. The early autumn’s first fallen leaves drifted and gathered in the sheltered spots. A river lay beyond the trees and the lane, down a steep bank. Perhaps she would go for a walk along there later; she had intended to yesterday but somehow the hours had gotten away from her, as was their habit.
The warm and earthy smell of coffee reminded her it would be ready now. As she went back to the island where the cafetière waited, she glanced at the floor in front of the Aga and stopped.
Those stains, returned. Of course they had.
She got down on her hands and knees, scratched at the largest one with the nail of her forefinger. The nail was bitten blunt, but she thought she might be able to scratch some of the stain away. She rubbed the tip of her finger against her thumb, looking for residue, even a speck of some crumbling matter. There was nothing.
Sara cursed and got to her feet. She went to the door at the opposite side of the kitchen, the one that opened onto a staircase leading down into the dark. Inside, she found the light switch, one of the few that had been fitted. The space below illuminated. She held the railing as she stepped down, ducking beneath the low ceiling.
She did not like this room, finding it oppressive, the darkness of its corners unleavened no matter how many ceiling lights were installed. Not many houses here had basements, Damien had explained, due to the high water table. But this house had one, dug out decades ago and reinforced with wooden beams, reaching under the hall and part way beneath the living room. His father’s tradesmen had modernised the basement, put in waterproof membranes, a new floor, and walls all freshly plastered, ready for painting. It had been plumbed and ventilated and fitted with a washer and dryer, along with shelves for cleaning items. She fetched a mop and bucket from one of the dim corners, and a stout brush from a shelf, along with a bottle of floor detergent.
As she climbed the stairs, Sara did not look back, feeling that she might see someone return her gaze. An irrational thought, but Damien said she was given to those.
In the kitchen, she half filled the bucket with hot water, along with a generous splash of the detergent. She brought the bucket to the space in front of the Aga, and once again got to her knees. Sara soaked the bristles of the brush and sloshed water onto the stained floor. She worked the brush hard into the stone, the detergent foaming. Her temples and jaw ached, and she realised how hard she had been grinding her teeth together.
After a few minutes of scrubbing, she wiped the suds away with her hand, showing clean stone, no stains left. Gone, finally.
“Thank—”
Before the second word could form in her mouth, a thunderous hammering boomed through the house, causing her to cry out. She remained on her knees for a moment, her mind scrambling to make sense of the noise, what it was, where it had come from.
Again, the rattling, booming thunder. Again, she startled.
Damien. Don’t wake Damien.
As that thought flitted through her head, she realized it was the new front door. Someone banging hard on the PVC. She looked to the window over the sink. The sky still bluish grey, barely dawn. A pealing fear sounded in her. No one knocked on doors at dawn unless they brought terrible news. Sara got to her feet and went to the sink, leaned over it, peered through the window.
There, an elderly woman, impossibly small.
She wore a nightdress, a dressing gown pulled loosely over it, one foot bare, the other with a slipper half on. The woman’s eyes darted here and there, across the front of the house, window to window. Her face twisted with fright and confusion. It occurred to Sara that she should go to the door and open it, ask this woman what she was doing here, help her.
Don’t wake Damien, she thought, the words pushing to the front of her mind.
As she remained frozen in place, staring, the old woman noticed her. The woman stepped towards the window, limping. Only inches between their faces now, separated by glass, the old woman’s eyes wild and piercing. Her mouth moved, and Sara heard her voice, weak and wavering, but she could not discern her words.
The old woman formed her right hand into a fist and hammered on the windowpane, wrenching Sara from her paralysis. Sara stepped back, retreating from the woman’s stare. The woman pounded on the glass once more.
Help her, Sara thought. For God’s sake, help her.
Finally, she moved, went to the hall and the front door. She pulled the lever handle, but it remained solidly in place. Locked, she remembered, and she ran back to the kitchen, to the bowl on the island, and grabbed the keys. Returning to the hall, she unlocked the door and opened it. The old woman was already there, pushing, pushing, stronger than Sara could have imagined, her voice rising as she forced her way inside, past Sara and into the hall. A trail of bloody footprints followed her. The insane idea to get the mop from the kitchen and clean the floor flashed in Sara’s mind.
The woman turned in a circle, her burning gaze moving from floor to wall to doorway to Sara, her voice a panicked shriek.
“Who are you?” the woman asked. “Why are you in my house?”
Product details
- ASIN : B08PXTWDVQ
- Publisher : Soho Crime (September 7, 2021)
- Publication date : September 7, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 512 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 305 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1616957417
- Best Sellers Rank: #643,001 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3,385 in International Mystery & Crime (Kindle Store)
- #4,168 in Paranormal Suspense
- #8,398 in Supernatural Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Stuart Neville's debut novel, THE TWELVE (published in the USA as THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), won the Mystery/Thriller category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was picked as one of the top crime novels of 2009 by both the New York Times and the LA Times. He has been shortlisted for various awards, including the Barry, Macavity, Dilys awards, as well as the Irish Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year. He has since published three critically acclaimed sequels, COLLUSION, STOLEN SOULS and THE FINAL SILENCE.
His first four novels have each been longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and RATLINES was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.
Stuart's novels have been translated into various languages, including German, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, Greek and more. The French edition of The Ghosts of Belfast, Les Fantômes de Belfast, won Le Prix Mystère de la Critique du Meilleur Roman Étranger and Grand Prix du Roman Noir Étranger.
His fourth novel, RATLINES, about Nazis harboured by the Irish state following WWII is currently in development for television.
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Stuart Neville is truly the master of Irish noir. His latest mystery, "The House of Ashes," is his best novel since his haunting debut, "The Ghosts of Belfast." Both novels are strongly rooted in the paranormal. "The House of Ashes" is a haunted house mystery, best read around Halloween. Fans of the superhit film franchise, "The Conjuring," will love it. I've always gravitated towards horror mysteries. Who are the children who are haunting The Ashes? Where did they come from? The Ashes has a dark, evil history that Sara Keane is hoping to disclose to the authorities, but she may not live long enough to accomplish this. Her husband, a control freak from Hell, is holding her a virtual prisoner inside her own home.
"The House of Ashes" is a cleverly written mystery that is actually two novels in one. The mystery alternates from Sara's present to the past (over sixty years ago) when Ivan Jackson lived in The Ashes with his two grown sons, George and "Tam." For at least thirteen years, the huge, brutish Jackson men kidnapped impoverished teenage girls and held them captive in their basement; they forced them to cook, clean, and bare children. The mystery is told from the point of view of four females: Sara Keane, the abused housewife, who is living in the present; Mary Jackson who is only six years old and was born in the Jackson's basement; Joy Turkington who was kept a prisoner in this same basement for thirteen years; and Esther Mooney who became the Jacksons' latest kidnap victim.
The unique setting is a secluded, isolated farmhouse, The Ashes, that has fallen in disrepair and suffered a horrible fire. It is located in a small town, Morganston, in Northern Ireland. A friendless Sara must remain alone at home while her architect husband, Damien, is at work and repairmen labor on renovating and expanding the house. Another, more modern, wing is being added to the house's original structure. Each morning, Sara scrubs away blood stains that mysteriously appear where the fireplace once stood. Sara is the novel's fragile, wounded heroine. Having already tried to kill herself once, she teeters on the brink of insanity. A local electrician, Antonio "Tony" Rossi, befriends her, having experienced creepy feelings inside the house. Other workmen have seen glimpses of ghostly children. Sara's abuse and near-death experience make her more susceptible to the paranormal events that plague The Ashes.
Stuart Neville's "The House of Ashes" is a very creepy, fast-paced, highly intriguing horror mystery that is rife with human suffering and grief. It is also one of the best ghost stories I've read in a long time. In the past, the trio of Jackson men is extremely evil, demented, and abusive. Together, they comprise a most formidable villain, the likes of which I have not read in a very long time. It is never clear how these men became so wantonly evil; a prequel could be written to account for this. In the present, Damian Keene and his father, Francie, are also very evil and corrupt. Sara must team up with Mary in order to conquer the evilness that has escaped from the past and infected the present. The ending is a rather uplifting one that gives me hope that goodness does sometimes prevail against evilness. I will hope that Neville's future novels continue to have a strong paranormal element.
Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy, but I wasn't required to leave a review.
The woman insists the house is hers. What’s more, she says the children need her.
Curious about the woman, and with literally nothing to occupy her time, Sara begins to dig into the story of The Ashes and learns that it was the site of a horrific crime. As she discovers more, she also gets to know Mary, the old woman. And it’s this that finally gives her the strength she needs to change her own life.
Stuart Neville is well known as a master of Irish crime fiction. This latest standalone is crime fiction but also so much more. It’s the story of two women, tied to one another by location and circumstance.
The book alternates, mostly, between Sara, present day, and Mary as she recounts her time living at The Ashes.
Sara is closed off thanks to her domineering husband. And his family has a history in the area. Her father-in-law is in property development—it was he who bought the house for Sara and Damien and he’s had a crew working to fix it up and add an addition. But Francie Keane is also well known because of his stint in prison. And Sara isn’t too clear on exactly why he was there.
For over a decade, Mary never knew anything outside of The Ashes. She lived there with Mummy Joy, Mummy Noreen, and the daddies. The daddies were always angry. There were others. Other women and even other children occasionally. But mostly it was Mary, Joy, and Noreen.
Until one day when everything changed.
Throughout, the book is peppered with pieces that set the tone and scene for the happenings in Northern Ireland. But that’s not the focus of the book by any means. Instead, it’s Mary and Sara. And a house that both women have theorized has never seen anything but tragedy.
I know it sounds like this is a heavy read. And it is, but it’s also got the atmosphere and propulsion of a crime novel. It’s literally compulsively readable! So much so that I finished it in just a matter of hours!
Top reviews from other countries
When I first started the book I thought, ‘not another domestic abuse saga’, having read a number with the same theme recently. However, this was different. The author marries events from 60 years previously with events of the present- successfully. It’s harrowing but believable.
Sara and Damien have moved to a house on the outskirts of Belfast which has been bought cheaply by Damien’s father (Francie) and is being renovated. Happenings occurred in the past by a previous farming family of 3 despicable men and two women with children. The plot is narrated by some of the characters, the main contributors being Sara and a surviving child, Mary. It’s not a pleasant story that is revealed. History repeats itself- showing that in some circumstances life doesn’t change.
None of the men, present and past, have any redeeming qualities. They are portrayed as abusive, violent excuses for humans.
The book is not for the faint hearted. Some reviewers have described it as depressing. I would describe the book as thought provoking.
Well written. The author should be proud to have highlighted the underbelly of family life whether readers wish to acknowledge or not.