The Haunted Ballad Series

The Weaver and the Factory Maid (The Haunted Ballad Series #1)

Author: Grabien, Deborah
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 192pp.
Pub. Date: December 10, 2003
Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur

Haunted by the ghosts of characters memorialized in their songs, a pair of lovers must uncover the truth behind the ghosts’ deaths.

When Ringan Laine, British folk musician, becomes the owner of a restored eighteenth-century cottage, he discovers right away that the cottage and the ancient barn on Ringan’s property are haunted.

Ringan and his longtime lover Penny, researching the identity of their unwanted tenants, learn that they were a young couple, victims of a famous double murder in the year 1817 – their story the subject of a song that is a staple in Ringan’s repertoire. And they must stage a full-scale musical exorcism to lay the ghostly couple to rest.

The Weaver and the Factory Maid is only the first in what promises to be an exciting new mystery series features the ghosts of characters in folk ballads.

The Famous Flower of Serving Men (The Haunted Ballad Series #2)

Author: Grabien, Deborah
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 224pp.
Pub. Date: October 14, 2004
Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur

Certainly some of the events are real — or, to be more accurate, they are partly hidden in a genuine English ballad that was composed and sung centuries ago. Just as the song in Grabien’s well-received first novel in this unusual series, The Weaver and the Factory Maid, tells a story that may or may not be based on an actual event — but that in any case reflects perfectly the world in which it is set. And once again our two very modern principals, Penelope Wintercraft-Hawkes (“Oh, please, just ‘Penny’”) and her lover, Ringan Laine, find themselves in uncomfortably closer contact with a long-gone world than they would like.

It all starts when a solicitor informs Penny that an elderly aunt, a woman she never met, has died and left Penny some “property in East Central London.” The “property” turns out to be a realization of Penny’s dream. She heads a touring theatre troupe that performs classic drama to audiences all over Britain and abroad. But Penny has yearned for a “home” — a theatre in London where she could prepare her season and launch her tours. And now, wonder of wonders, Aunt Mary — Mary Therese Isabel Heatherington — whom Penny has never even met — has given her the very thing.

At first look, the condition of the building is dismaying. It is very old and needs considerable work. But practical Aunt Mary has left money toward that purpose, and Ringan Laine is a well-known and very talented restoration architect, who when he isn’t singing and playing old English songs with the other musicians in his own traveling troupe, eagerly applies his skills to Penny’s theatre.

And then, when Ringan is working alone late one afternoon, he is surprised to hear someone singing, singing a song so drenched with sadness he shudders at the sound. The voice begins to be heard often during the day, and not only by Ringan. Who is the singer, what is the song that seems to have soaked into the old building’s walls?

Penny begins to dig into the history books and learns that there was much violence at the site centuries ago, violence that has left frightening remnants in the present. It is clear that before Penny can use her heritage they must find what terrible thing happened to the woman whose story the song seems to be telling, and what they can do to lay her ghost to final rest. Only when that is done can the curtain go up without mishap.

Matty Groves (The Haunted Ballad Series #3)

Author: Grabien, Deborah
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 256pp.
Pub. Date: September 15, 2005
Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur

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.

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.

Cruel Sister (The Haunted Ballad Series #4)

Author: Grabien, Deborah
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 240pp.
Pub. Date: October 17, 2006
Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur

Penny Wintercraft-Hawkes’s brother has returned from Hong Kong with a comfortable fortune and a new bride and is planning to build a house on land he’s inherited. Because they want a house as much like an Elizabethan mansion as its “mod cons” will allow, they ask Penny’s lover, Ringan Laine, to work on it as a consultant. Ringan is not only a noted musician but also a designer and architect well versed in the first Elizabeth’s colorful period.

The house is to be on the Isle of Dogs, and Penny’s brother, his new wife, and Penny herself are delighted with the site. Ringan, however, comes away feeling very uncomfortable. A few weeks later, in London on business, he goes back alone, hoping to clear up any misgivings he has about the place. But this visit is even worse than the first. He hears women’s voices, frightening and full of passion, coming from the air around him.

That evening, Ringan is sleeping in Penny’s flat; she has taken her theater troupe to Italy. A late-night phone call from Penny reveals to them both that they had an identical dream. In it, two young women on the Isle of Dogs are fighting. One is begging the other not to drown her. Their speech and their clothes put them firmly in the reign of Henry VIII. Once more, Penny and Ringan are being visited by tragic spirits from their country’s past.

This is the fourth in Deborah Grabien’s gripping and unusual Haunted Ballad series. Her stories pair two sophisticated and very likable people whose lives are invaded by tortured souls from England’s history. With each encounter, Penny and Ringan are forced to find a way to lay along-suffering ghost to rest.

New-Slain Knight (The Haunted Ballad Series #5)

Author: Grabien, Deborah
Format: Hardcover
Type: Horror Novel
Page Count: 240pp.
Pub. Date: November 13, 2007
Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur

It’s summer in England, and — with nothing urgent demanding their attention — Ringan and Penny are planning a quiet vacation alone together. Their plans change when Ringan’s niece, fourteen-year-old violin prodigy Becca, is dumped in their care while her parents deal with an emergency abroad.

Ringan has no idea what to do with a teenage relative. Penny points out that Becca is more a musician than a child, and suggests a musical holiday in Cornwall. Playing in front of a live audience with Ringan and a band will give the girl much-needed experience and confidence. It will let Ringan get to know his niece better, as well.

It’s a good plan, and everyone approves. And yet something about the St. Ives home of their host, Gowan, leaves Penny uneasy. She hears voices in her mind, speaking in Cornish, and has a horrifying vision through the eyes of a dying man.

When, soon after, she finds Becca sleepwalking, Penny learns from Gowan that, many years earlier, his emotionally unstable lover hanged herself in this house. It may simply be the echoes of that tragedy disturbing both her and Becca.

But after Becca has a seizure during a live performance of a seemingly harmless song, Penny and Ringan realize that a much older tragedy hangs over Gowan and his family. And if they can’t find the truth and lay to rest whatever ghosts still walk, they may lose Becca.

New-Slain Knight, the fifth in the Haunted Ballad mystery series, touches on the ties that bind: family, the past and the present, and the mystery that lies behind every story.