Spencer Hawk

Buried Draughts Spencer Hawk

Fleeing her past for a new town, Linda Brandt accepts a secretary's position from psychiatrist and sex researcher, Dr. Meredith Rivals, and unknowingly becomes a guinea pig in a two hundred year old experiment in mind control, the catalyst behind Clarissa Walker's revenge and the hope of the ghost, Liz, to end this curse. Buried Draughts is book one of an adult paranormal fiction trilogy. For over two centuries the families running the town did so with a plan. Seeking a position among them, Meredith works at perfecting a chemical means of sexually controlling people, using Linda as an experimental case study. Clarissa is marked by the whip and a cloak of insanity, due to her brother, Anton, and Meredith's early experiments, Clarissa sees Linda's danger and beauty. Linda, thinking herself an empty shell of the woman she once was, responds to Clarissa's flirtation and painful possession... finding renewal. Ignoring ghostly warnings, Linda stays, submitting to Clarissa's plan. Ellen Martin had been drugged, raped, and dropped onto the spikes of Hell's Gate of the cemetery, as a sacrificial lamb, to seal that passage. Surviving, less one eye and half a breast, she works in her father's bakery, refusing to live... until connecting with Linda. As the three women grow close, Liz has them rescue spirits trapped by those ruling families, hoping to break the curse that holds them. While Meredith tests her drugs on Linda and another victim, Clarissa, Ellen and the ghosts work to strengthen Linda. For Clarissa's plan to succeed, they need Meredith's advancement and connections, leaving Linda in her dangerous control. At Anton's return, working for the ranked families, Clarissa draws the line, intending to kill her brother and his group, to claim what he came to rescue from an abandoned and destroyed mansion.