The Myth Keeper (A Novel)

A young woman gifted with magical insight searches for the missing daughter of a gentry family on England's wild Cornish coast in this romantic adventure from the author of The Sea Child.

When a strange, disembodied voice deep in the copper mine tells twenty-year-old Florence to run, she obeys. The next thing she knows, she’s the only survivor of a cave-in that has killed six of her fellow miners. After a newspaper claims that the mine’s magical fairies, known as piskies,  warned her, local landowner Thomas Rosevear offers Florence the position of companion to his mother, who believes piskies took Thomas’s twin sister Jane when she was a free-spirited thirteen-year-old. It’s a chance for Florence to escape her grueling job in the mines, but there is a catch. An Arctic explorer and man of science, Thomas doesn’t believe in folklore, but wants Florence to pretend to talk with piskies to help his mother come to terms with the loss of her daughter.

As Florence spins tales for the forbidding Mrs. Rosevear at the family’s crumbling estate on the windswept Cornish coast, candles go out without a breeze, knitting is worked by unseen hands, and mysterious laughter sounds in empty rooms. After Thomas warns her away from a haunted fairy wood on the grounds, Florence starts to believe in the piskies herself —and becomes determined to find out what happened to Jane. But the ominous magic rumored to have held the Rosevears in its grip proves far darker than Florence had imagined. Meanwhile, Thomas is drawn to Florence, though the class difference between them keeps Florence on her guard.

From the depths of Victorian mines to the misty moors and untamed shores of Cornwall, Florence chases myths in her quest for answers. But when the mysterious events at the house turn sinister, and then deadly, she must confront her fears and find her strength in age-old legends as she fights for survival.