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Capturing the Texas Rancher's Heart

Haunted house mystery

The third entry in this series, Matty Groves is another bewitching tale of how mysteries thought dead and buried can still return to threaten the living.

Haunted Ballad
Minotaur Books
October 2005
Featuring: Ringan Laine; Penny Wintercraft-Hawkes
256 pages
ISBN: 0312333897
Hardcover
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Deborah Grabien

Ringan Laine has a prized invitation to perform with his
band at the Callowen House Arts Festival and he’s been
asked to bring his longtime lover, actor-producer Penny
Wintercraft-Hawkes, along as an honored guest. At the
prestigious two-week annual festival, artists not only
perform to a handpicked audience, but enjoy every luxury
their host has to offer.

For Ringan and Penny, it’s a mixed blessing. The couple has
already held two terrifying exorcisms for ghosts whose
stories are told in songs, and Callowen House is known to
be haunted by the pretty young wife of a seventeenth-
century Leight-Arnold. A famous traditional song, “Matty
Groves,” tells her story, a straightforward one that Miles
Leight-Arnold is very proud of. Ringan and Penny decide to
attend; after all, this story has no mystery for them to
solve. But from the first night it becomes clear that the
tragic Lady Susanna is not the only spirit haunting
Callowen House. Something else is awake, moving through
walls and nightmares, growing stronger as it feeds on
Penn’s sensitivity and on the very fear it creates: Andrew
Leight, a man as twisted and violent in death as he was in
life. Lord Callowen insists that Ringan and Penny rid
Callowen House of the dangerous Leight but leave Lady
Susanna’s ghost untouched.

As the pair searches the mansion’s ancient ledgers, Ringan
and Penny begin to suspect that Lady Susanna’s death was
not as simple as the song suggests, and that the truth may
expose a four-hundred-year-old lie.