N.G. RileyFICTION, TOLD SLOWLY

Annora — A Confession

He was sent to destroy her kind. Neither of them was prepared for the rest.

Father Edmund Clarke is a Custodian — a priest whose duties extend beyond the parish register and into work no bishop will own. When two women vanish from Wolcombe without blood or blame, he has one lead: the woman at the edge of the wood, whom whispers follow like shadow.

She should be his quarry. Instead, she keeps turning up.

Annora has survived centuries by avoiding men like him. Yet here she is — entangled in his hunt, haunting his pews, circling a truth she has not confessed and cannot outrun.

Bound by an uneasy bargain, priest and vampire uncover a rot older than either of them guessed. One that reaches into the very walls of Saint Audric's, where something has been feeding far longer than anyone will admit.

But the nearer Edmund draws to the truth, the more his alliance becomes its own damnation. Beneath her cruelty lies something she has spent centuries burying. Beneath his vows lies a want no prayer is strong enough to silence.

To save his parish, Edmund must decide whether a monster may still possess a soul.
To save Annora, he may have to forfeit his own.

Annora: A Confession is a dark, sharply drawn Gothic novel set in 1930s England — part murder mystery, part spiritual reckoning, told as one priest's unflinching account of the year that tested everything he believed.