"Forgive me, Father. I did it again."Every Friday a woman kneels in the seventh booth of a dying seaside church and confesses a murder to the one priest bound by his vow never to repeat a single word of it. She is not sorry. She is not even a killer. She is bait, the confession is a hook, and Father Elias Kerrigan, the last honest man in Sable Creek, is the fish. Lazara Lowe restores old churches for a living.
She reads walls as other people read faces, and the wall she has crossed an ocean to read has a girl bricked up behind it. To pry it open she needs a witness the town cannot buy, cannot frighten, and cannot silence, and she has chosen the one man whose collar makes him all three. She means to use his faith, his loneliness, and his fall as tools. It works. What she did not plan for was meaning it. When a fresh body turns up staged like a saint on the shingle, priest and con woman are pulled into the same buried crime, and the closer Elias comes to the truth, the closer he comes to the lie at the center of the woman in his arms, and to a memory of his own that a locked wall has kept from him his whole life.
She came to burn a holy institution to the ground. She did not come to be wanted. She did not come to be seen. And she has never once been either, until now, by the one man she is going to have to betray. The Seventh Sacrament, Book 1. A gothic forbidden-romance thriller for readers who like their holy water boiling. Perfect for readers who love: Forbidden priest romance with a real mystery underneath; A morally gray, brilliant, painfully self-aware heroine; Gothic seaside atmosphere and buried-truth suspense; Slow-burn tension that pays off at the highest heat; A duology opener that ends on a knife-edge hook.
Content note: adult dark romance for readers 18+; explicit sexual content, murder and its aftermath, references to the death of a child in backstory, grief, and institutional abuse of power.
"Forgive me, Father. I did it again."Every Friday a woman kneels in the seventh booth of a dying seaside church and confesses a murder to the one priest bound by his vow never to repeat a single word of it. She is not sorry. She is not even a killer. She is bait, the confession is a hook, and Father Elias Kerrigan, the last honest man in Sable Creek, is the fish. Lazara Lowe restores old churches for a living.
She reads walls as other people read faces, and the wall she has crossed an ocean to read has a girl bricked up behind it. To pry it open she needs a witness the town cannot buy, cannot frighten, and cannot silence, and she has chosen the one man whose collar makes him all three. She means to use his faith, his loneliness, and his fall as tools. It works. What she did not plan for was meaning it. When a fresh body turns up staged like a saint on the shingle, priest and con woman are pulled into the same buried crime, and the closer Elias comes to the truth, the closer he comes to the lie at the center of the woman in his arms, and to a memory of his own that a locked wall has kept from him his whole life.
She came to burn a holy institution to the ground. She did not come to be wanted. She did not come to be seen. And she has never once been either, until now, by the one man she is going to have to betray. The Seventh Sacrament, Book 1. A gothic forbidden-romance thriller for readers who like their holy water boiling. Perfect for readers who love: Forbidden priest romance with a real mystery underneath; A morally gray, brilliant, painfully self-aware heroine; Gothic seaside atmosphere and buried-truth suspense; Slow-burn tension that pays off at the highest heat; A duology opener that ends on a knife-edge hook.
Content note: adult dark romance for readers 18+; explicit sexual content, murder and its aftermath, references to the death of a child in backstory, grief, and institutional abuse of power.
