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A PENANCE FOR CROWS
A Novel
BY SHANNON MORGAN
Blurb
An unnerving, hypnotic, modern gothic thriller set on a remote Irish island, where an artist is caught between deadly secrets, ancient superstition, and echoing madness. For fans of Simone St. James, Eve Chase, and Jennifer McMahon.
Off the southern tip of the Beara Peninsula lies Beanna Dubh, an island of savage beauty, its jagged cliffs lashed by Atlantic winds and infested by thousands of crows. Untouched by 21st-century advances, the islanders live under the strict rule of the church, while clinging to old superstitions of the crows as harbingers of disaster. To this desolate, unforgiving place Grizela Urquhart fled, seeking sanctuary from brutal bullying in her native Glasgow.
40 years on, Grizela still remains an outsider—the eccentric painter viewed with distrust and barely tolerated. The feelings are mutual, for she has discovered there are as many secrets on Beanna Dubh as there are crows.
When she stumbles upon the body of a young priest with a diabolical symbol drawn on his chest, the crows darken the skies, and Grizela is plagued by demonic whispers only she can hear. The islanders’ suspicions fall on her, but she fears the answers lie in her tortured past.
As mass hysteria grows, Grizela scrambles to protect the innocent—a quartet of young girls she has taken under her wing. When she uncovers dark truths behind the girls’ mysterious midnight gatherings, her grip on reality unravels and she is faced with an impossible choice: do the unthinkable to protect the girls as the whispers urge, or come out of hiding to face the sins of her past.
A PENANCE FOR CROWS
A Novel
BY SHANNON MORGAN
Excerpt
Like tatters of black cloth, the crows whipped and tossed on the cruel wind, shrieking defiance at the storm amassing over the Atlantic.
As stubborn as the crows, Grizela Urquhart forged onwards, the chill in her aging bones making her long for the merry fire banked in her cottage, awaiting her return. Clutching the bag containing her easel and paints to her chest, she trudged doggedly south, along the cliff path towards the southern tip of Beanna Dubh, determined to reach the Silver Wood before nightfall.
Grizela loved the beautiful savagery of this remote, wind-swept island on the southernmost tip of the Beara Peninsula of Ireland. She loved the coves that fringed the island, dashed eternally by briny violence whatever the weather. She loved the treacherous heart of the island where heather hid peat bogs in the valley between sheer mountains. But mostly she loved the crows, their darkness in legend and nature, their curiosity, their intelligence, and their proud independence in the face of adversity.
She rarely saw the islanders on this end of Beanna Dubh; most of the three-hundred strong population lived in the more sheltered north, in the village of Abbandine. This suited Grizela. She liked the islanders well enough, most of them anyway, but she was selective with the company she kept.
In the near distance, she could make out the Widows—five standing stones teetering on the cliff edge of a narrow inlet, now dimmed to little more than tall shadows in the gloom of the winter afternoon.
Grizela squinted at the crows when their screeches stilled. They gave up their battle with the wind and plummeted over the cliff edge.
Hurrying past the Widows, she looked down at the inlet below, stung by the spray as the waves hit the cliffs with youthful vigour, an omen of the lashing the island was in for that night. The crescent of pebble-dashed shingle seemed unnaturally still beside the thrashing waves. The crows had settled there, not moving but for the wind ruffling their feathers.
Not sure what had attracted the birds’ attention, Grizela paused, her frizzled, grey hair whipping about her face, a fine sleet grating her skin. A hoarse whispering rose above the churn of air and water. Faint, but there, like the murmur of the sea gods protesting the vehemence of the storm.
The crows were all staring at a large dark shape on the narrow beach. They made no move towards it. They just stared. Unmoving. Silent.
Grizela thought it was a seal that had pulled itself out for a respite from the ocean’s snarl and thrash. Seals were a common sight on Beanna Dubh, and assuming this seal’s respite might be permanent to garner the crows’ undivided attention, she half turned to continue on her journey.
The crows croaked in unison. Just once. She stopped. Already cold, an icy finger scraped down her spine when she peered at the cove again, to find the crows had changed position. Now facing the Widows, they stared at Grizela with corvine intensity.
“You’re freaking me out,” she muttered, when the sleek heads swivelled back to stare at the dead seal. It lay oddly, sort of flattened, not a blubbery heap. A flipper flapped above it.
Grizela stepped cautiously off the path to the edge of the cliff and searched for the movement that might have been a trick of the miserly light or an errant wave. It came again in the next sea-drenched gust; the seal moved in a most unseal-like manner, rather like the snap and slap of material caught in the wind.
The problem with curiosity was it led with a decided lack of caution. Still, Grizela followed her curiosity. She quickly found the roughly hewn steps leading to the cove and was instantly soaked by the spray.
The crows hopped a little to either side, opening a small corridor for Grizela to walk through, watching her with their own insatiable curiosity.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Grizela whispered. Her words set the crows off, their croaking echoing off the sheer cliffs of the tight inlet.
About Author Shannon Morgan…
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Links to Shannon’s websites, blogs, books, #ad, etc.:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/4w9b9Rn
Penguin Random House: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/818194/a-penance-for-crows-by-shannon-morgan/
Website: shannonmorganauthor.com
Twitter as @morgan_shan.
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Special Giveaway: Shannon will gift a print copy (U.S. Only) of A PENANCE FOR CROWS to one lucky reader who comments on her Karen’s Killer Book Bench blog. Happy Reading!
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Well, this is ominous… 👀👀
Nice to meet you, Shannon. ( I have a niece named Shannon 😊 )
Thanks, Shannon and thanks, Karen, for the introduction
Intriguing title and book cover, excerpt you’re a new author for me always glad to find and meet a new author because like trying their writing styles