Leslie Stone Books In Order
- Five Mile House (2000)
- Innocence (2003)
- The Wilderness (2005)
Novels
- Ordinary Monsters (2002)
Leslie Stone Book Covers
Novels Book Covers
Karen Novak Books Overview
Five Mile House
A modern day mystery haunted by a 19th Century ghost. Eleanor Bly haunts Five Mile House, looking for someone to tell her story to. Jumping from a window to her death in 1889, Eleanor’s soul is at unrest until the truth is told about her life and death. She finally finds Leslie, one hundred years later. Leslie bears an uncanny resemblance to Eleanor and is sympathetic if only because of the ghost she carries around herself…
In a moment of temporary insanity, Leslie shoots and kills the suspected perpetrator of a hideous child murder. When evidence is inconclusive, Leslie enters a severe depression and is temporarily institutionalized. When she is released from the hospital, her husband, in an effort to change their environment, takes his family to a small New England town to work on a mysterious restoration project of Five Mile House. It doesn’t take long for them to hear about Eleanor, a 19th century madwoman who murdered her seven children in Five Mile House. Leslie becomes obsessed with Eleanor’s story, suspecting that the truth may be different from the accepted myth. Wellington, locally known for its coven of wiccan followers, has many secrets of its own. The stories of both women are told in parallel narratives until they converge at the very end. As frightening as it is suspenseful, Five Mile House is a classic page turner, a haunted house story and also the story about the lengths a mother will go to in order to protect her children.
Innocence
Innocence unravels the mysterious tale of a small town’s dark past and a current tragedy, which threatens to open old wounds and awaken old ghosts. Leslie Stone is a private investigator whose specialty is missing children. Her experience has left her haunted by hallucinatory echoes of kids who are not coming back. But when Leslie’s own thirteen year old daughter, Molly, attempts to hire her to find a vanished friend, the echoes start to take their form from Leslie’s own troubled childhood. As the search for Molly’s friend Lydia gets underway, it becomes apparent that there’s much more to the story: a party of eighth graders at Lydia’s home got out of hand and has resulted in charges of sexual assault against five thirteen year old boys. The once rural town and now burgeoning suburb of Swifton Woods. Swifton has labored for decades under the stigma of an unsolved series of abductions and rapes of eleven young girls, who came to be known as the Nightingales. An incidental connection between Lydia’s party and Swifton’s past only fans the public response to an ugly rage. The boys’ conviction seems all but inevitable. Molly, however, knows more than she’s telling. In trying to honor a solemn promise while negotiating her inherent sense of right and wrong, she finds herself despised by those she most wants to help. At the same time, Leslie’s increasing worry for the depth of Molly’s involvement begins to weave into her own secret knowledge of the Nightingales’ history. In the end, she is left uncertain of every instinct but the one that demands she protect her child. Even if that means she has to betray her own childhood by telling everything.
The Wilderness
Read the dark and thrilling new Leslie Stone novel that asks the question: Can violence and its legacy ever be absolved? When the body of an elderly man is found naked, frozen to death on the grounds of an abandoned petting zoo near where private investigator Leslie Stone lives with her family, the discovery triggers what Leslie calls the ‘haunted amuseme*nt park’ of her mind. Voices and apparitions she knows to be hallucinatory disrupt her waking world. And she is unable to forget that the old man has left behind what seems like a riddle: an odd drawing and a children’s poem with a shifting meaning, titled ‘The Wilderness.’ Compelled to find out what happened, Leslie finds her search interlacing with that of investigative journalist Sophia Mallory, who is tracing her personal path through the historical tragedy of slavery and its aftermath. Together they uncover a pattern of institutionalized violence so brutal, so inexplicable, that it resembles a curse. As ‘The Wilderness‘ leads each woman deeper into the past, it also leads them deeper into their own psyches, forcing them to question their motives for solving a mystery which threatens to destroy the lives of everyone they love.
Ordinary Monsters
A mother’s search for her lost son leads her to a most unusual, almost mythical California desert town. Nestled in a hidden valley, L grimas is the last stop for a host of eccentric and questionable souls. When Joyce arrives looking for her son on a tip from a hitchhiker who claims to have seen him there, she settles in a bit too quickly for the locals’ comfort. Much to her crushing disappointment, the boy she’s been led to is not her son, but an emotionally battered teenager who communicates solely through lines from The Tempest. The locals, suspicious of Joyce’s intent, believe that she has brought with her the forces of the Owl, a devastating storm that threatens to demolish L grimas once every decade. Like a storm, the histories of Joyce and all of L grimas’ inhabitants come raining down over the course of this riveting novel. Emotionally wrought and ultimately redeeming, Ordinary Monsters is a remarkable story about the sorrow of loss and the gift of healing.
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