When Grace's husband Adam inherits a little cottage from his grandparents in the small village of Roseby, an isolated North Yorkshire village, they gather up their new baby, Millie, and leave the fast paced city of London behind. Thinking it may be a great place to raise their daughter, they're both excited to see where this new phase of life will lead them. However, a week after moving into the cottage, Adam and Grace go on an errand, one from which Adam never returns. Grace mysteriously turns up in her carriage at the front door of the cottage but Adam is nowhere to be found.

After an exhaustive search that leads to no discovery of Adam, Grace and Millie return to France with her parents. They remain there for a year until Grace decides that she must get on with her life and wants to go back to the cottage. This is, after all, Millie's inheritance and she feels that she at least owes it to her daughter to take care of that part of things.

Not having decided whether she wants to live there or not, she gathers up Millie and the two of them return to what may just be home now. However, it only takes a very short while to discover that things aren't as they may seem in this little village. The cottage makes strange noises at night and the huge grandfather clock in the hallway seems to start and stop of its own free will.

After spending just a couple of nights there, Grace is leaning toward simply getting things in order and renting out the cottage rather than live in it. When the realtor visits to go over things with her, he suggests that she do some renovations in order to rent it more easily. This is the suggestion that leads her to get acquainted with Ben, a man who looks disturbingly familiar to her, but whom she can't possibly have ever met. He offers to do the work on the cottage for her so she decides to tough it out until those are completed.

An additional odd cast of characters begin to make their way into Grace's life along with an offer to buy the cottage from her. When Grace's sister joins her for the holidays, she finds that there are a lot of ghost stories and ghostly locations in this small village. While interesting to her journalist sister, it's frightening to Grace.

In her quest to find out what happened to her husband, Grace discovers that Adam had a few secrets of his own. Could these secrets have led to his disappearance? Did he truly abandon her and Millie like everyone thinks? Grace can't bring herself to belief that the Adam she loved would ever have done something like that to her and their daughter. But as she digs deeper, the answers may also put her in danger.

BENEATH THE SHADOWS is the debut novel of writer Sara Foster and I, personally, hope there will be many more. This book has everything! A woman in peril, a vanished husband, and a rather gothic atmosphere along with a well-rounded group of characters that you simply don't know whether to trust or fear are all here. Take my advice and read this one with all the lights on!