Sep 199 min read

Exploring The Llysygarn Series: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Thorne Moore's Books, Sneak Peeks, and Giveaway!

Hi everyone. Today I am featuring "The Llysygarn Series" by: Thorne Moore. She has a special guest post planned for you to check out and I even got a sneak peek from one of her books. Check out the entire series below and make sure to read to the bottom for a special giveaway. Happy reading :).

The Llysygarn Series by: Thorne Moore, Tour Banner

Houses

I love old houses and in Britain old can mean anything up to seven or eight centuries old, and maybe built on foundations that go back far beyond that. In the city of Bath there’s a tea shop, Sally Lunn’s, where you can visit the basement and peer down a shaft that reveals layer upon of foundations going back to Roman times. The thing about old houses is that they have probably seen it all, everything that life has to offer, birth, growth, work, age, love and hate, dreams and nightmares, triumphs and failures. And death, of course. People died at home, sometimes before their time, sometimes, perhaps, even violently. It’s hard not to imagination that old houses have soaked up the history of those that have lived there, their stones and bricks and timbers imprinted with memories of it all, like layer upon layer of wallpaper.

That’s why houses so frequently make their way into my books as characters in their own right. Sometimes, as is the case with SHADOWS and LONG SHADOWS, the house (Llys y Garn) could almost be described as the main character. It’s an old house, older than it looks, as is often the way. Like their inhabitants, houses do grow, change, adapt and age, until you can never be quite sure what they were in their infancy. Like other old houses, Llys y Garn has its secrets. Many houses do – forgotten treasures in cobwebbed lofts, papers, photographs, buttons slipped down between floorboards. Most will be entirely innocent, maybe not even interesting, but some can be quite startling. Ightham Mote, a glorious medieval moated house in Kent, dating back to the 14th century, has a story of a very startling find. In the 1870s, workmen removed a section of wall panelling and found a recess behind, containing the seated skeleton of a woman.

People have puzzled ever since over who she was and why she was walled up. One theory is that she was Dame Dorothy Selby, punished by her family for betraying the gunpowder plot in 1605 – which is improbable, since she lived many years more, admired for her needlework, and was buried in the local church. Another suggestion is that the girl was a servant seduced by the local priest and walled up to avoid scandal. Very decent of her to sit quietly while she slowly starved and suffocated. Unfortunately, the truth is probably far more prosaic. There is no reliable evidence beyond gossip that a skeleton was ever found, and no record of what became of it. If it did exist, it was probably placed there as a New Year prank by a couple of medical students who were visiting for Christmas. But the story really ought to be true, because Ightham Mote is exactly the sort of place where such things could have happened.

My fictional house of Llys y Garn, has its share of startling secrets, and in SHADOWS, my contemporary heroine Kate is all too conscious of them, haunted by them and knowing that they are so buried in the past that they will never be explained. Except that the joy of being an author is that I can look into the past, so in LONG SHADOWS the mysteries are traced back, all the way to the fourteenth century.

The Llysygarn Series by: Thorne Moore, Promo Graphic

There are old tragedies sealed in the stones of Llysygarn and their shadows don't let go.

Shadows

Llysygarn Book 1

by: Thorne Moore

Genre: Paranormal Historical Crime

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GOODREADS

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BOOKBUB

Kate Lawrence can sense the shadow of violent death and it's a curse she longs to escape. But, joining her cousin Sylvia and partner Michael in their mission to restore and revitalise the old mansion of Llys y Garn, she finds herself in a place thick with the shadows of past deaths.

She seeks to face them down but new shadows are rising. Sylvia's manipulative son, Christian, can destroy everything. Once more, Kate senses that a violent death has occurred…

A haunting exploration of the dark side of people and landscape, set in the majestic and magical Welsh countryside.

Purchase your Copy Today!

AMAZON

No!

I didn’t hear the word, but I felt it, pushing me out of the cramped attic room, with its leaking dormer window among the chimney pots.

All through our tour of the house, I’d been waiting for some shadow to spring out on me. Sylvia had led me up staircases, down corridors, through one derelict room after another, but this, high up under the eaves, was the first sense of death and dark emotion I’d felt. There was fear in this garret, and a lingering panic, but mostly there was a strident, fierce defiance, determined to push me out.

No!

So I pushed back, and followed Sylvia in.

I’d done it. I’d conquered. Not so difficult after all. I just had to be strong. It was still there, that melting pot of fear and resistance, but I could put it firmly to one side.

‘…and perhaps the guttering.’ While I was vanquishing my shadows, Sylvia was considering the large blooms of damp on the sloping ceiling. She looked at me anxiously. ‘Could we?’

‘Sure!’ I felt absurdly all-conquering. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ I followed her, gleeful in my triumph, back down servants’ stairs to the ground floor.

She flung open double doors. ‘Ta-Ra! The drawing room. It’s the only one we’ve seriously tackled so far. What do you think?’

‘Hey.’ I could see why the room had inspired her into action. It was all mock-medieval plasterwork, with a Gothic fireplace and touches of stained glass in the tall arched windows that opened onto the terrace. Sylvia had decked it out with William Morris wallpaper, a chaise longue upholstered in faded red velvet, an Oriental rug and a brass oil-lamp with Tiffany shade. It was hard not to be impressed.

‘Wonderful. Creative. Just right.’ I reeled off compliments. It certainly demonstrated the potential of the place. Every other room merely screamed ‘Rewiring! Dry rot! Woodworm!’

‘I love it,’ said Sylvia. ‘Well, I think that’s it here. Now come outside.’

In the entrance hall, with its patterned tiles and mock-Tudor staircase, we struggled with the bolts of the towering front door, and emerged into the rinsing chill of a spring morning. Tissues of mist were clearing from the tree tops and the distant fields were already free from frost, though the sloping pasture below us was still crystalline grey.

From a mossy balustrade with crumbling urns, I surveyed the house. Solid Victorian, with heavy-handed touches of Gothic Revival; a pointed window here and there, a gargoyle or two, writhing vines on the woodwork.

‘We were so lucky to find it,’ said Sylvia happily. ‘When it went up for auction, I expect most people were put off by the amount of work it needs. Listed building and all that.’

‘But you and Mike didn’t mind?’

‘Of course not! I know there’s masses to do, but it’s such a dream and we’ve got money between us. Not endless money but you know, if we manage it carefully.’

I laughed. Sylvia had never managed anything carefully in her life, least of all money.

‘And if we can get the easy bits up and running, like the lodge, well, it will just pay for itself, won’t it?’

I doubted it, but practicalities could come later.

‘Of course it’s a gamble,’ she went on. ‘But we fell helplessly head over heels in love with it as soon as we saw it. And it does have incredible possibilities, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh God, yes.’ If the initial financial nightmares could be sorted out. That was where I came in. Nothing like a challenge.

‘Obviously guests,’ Sylvia took my arm and led me along, scrunching on gravel. ‘Music festivals perhaps. And a restaurant. You know, local organic produce, and our own herbs and vegetables. Themed weekends.’

We reached the end of the terrace. ‘And of course this is the real pièce de résistance.’

I jumped. There had been something so comfortably bourgeois about the Victorian façade that I was unprepared for what lay round the corner. The remnant of an old house. Much older, crouching behind the new. Nothing fake about this Gothic. Crumbling stonework, sagging beams, a small bush sprouting from a chimney.

‘What do you think?’ asked Sylvia, gleefully. ‘I could have taken you in through the house, but it’s so much more dramatic from this angle. Isn’t it incredible?’

I stared into the darkness behind crooked mullioned windows. My victory over an odd twinge in a servant’s attic was forgotten. This was altogether more forbidding. There were centuries upon centuries fossilised here.

‘A pity there’s so little of it,’ Sylvia continued. ‘Not much more than a hall, really, with a minstrel’s gallery. Oh, and there’s a dungeon. With a spiral stair! Lord knows how old it is. Mike’s researched it all, says it was already here in 1540. The rest of the house was demolished and rebuilt in Queen Anne’s time, and then again in Eighteen something.’ She patted the neat Victorian stonework as we passed.

I shivered. Hardly surprising with the frost still intact on the shaded gravel. Shiver with cold if I must, but it was absurd to shiver because of what might lie within.

There might be nothing.

Then again… Dungeons, Sylvia said. I’d dealt with an attic. Did I really have to deal with a dungeon too, on my first day?

The Llysygarn Series by: Thorne Moore, Tour Graphic

Long Shadows