New Gothic Romance

Lulled to sleep by grace. Soothed into inaction by forgiveness. Numbed by grief. Led to apathy by distant images of hate. Murderous, thunderous images in abeyance, a shark’s shredding teeth kept at bay by one sheer glass screen. A letter from the past slaps Kenna into action. Who knew an ancient letter could wake the dead, give a country’s coronation stone voice?

Another in her line of Gothic romances, Joanna McKethan’s Stone of Her Destiny takes us on the journey of a quest novel, as Kenna moves from NC to Scotland to cover news of the returning coronation rock “Stone of Destiny” to Edinburgh Castle after a 700-year gap where it sat in Westminster Abbey as a spoil of war. Galvanized by loss and grief, Kenna shoves everything aside to pursue her holy grail, the real Stone of Destiny. A daunting task unless like Kenna you are chosen by God or circumstance or 7 generations of lineage to reactivate facts overlooked by everyone before, facts rediscovered in Kenna’s attic lineage–and in her new residence at Blackheart Heights in Tarbert, Scotland.

From history come forces that stalk her today, kidnap her, watch her and let her go on an unseen tether. Secret societies search the same holy grail and think she knows something, or that she may lead them to something they, too have lost. They must have the real stone at any cost and they believe she just may lead them to it.

Suspense doesn’t grow without love and romance hand in hand in this novel. You might say one feeds the other.

Spies, art objects, love, and danger fill Joanna McKethan’s other novels as well as this new one; Veiled in White is set in spy-infested Estonia near St. Petersburg, Russia. Yuletide Folly is set in Southern Pines on a politician’s megalithic horse estate, and A Deadly Provenance sends a heroine into threats in post-Nazi, Cold War Bavaria, Germany. Her Gothic romances contain espionage in no small measure,  like Czech Mate.

Stone of Her Destiny is due to be released November 30, 2017, on St. Andrews Day–the stone was stolen in 1296 and was returned by Prince Andrew on St. Andrew’s Day to Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle November 30 in 1996.

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