The first of the catchup "T" books - The Darkest Room is a beautifully involving book - one of those books that interestingly includes a "storytelling" thread - but is really a great storytelling book in its own right.
From the Blurb:
It is bitter mid-winter when Katrine and Joakim Westin move with their children into the old manor house at Eel Point on the Swedish island of Öland.
Opening Lines:
Winter 1846. This is where my book begins. Katrine, the year when the manor house at Eel Point was built. For me the manor was more than a house where my mother and I lived, it was the place where I became an adult.
'The dead are our neighbours everywhere on the island, and you have to get used to it.'
It is bitter mid-winter on the Swedish island of Oland, and Katrine and Joakim Westin have moved with their children to the boarded-up manor house at Eel Point. But their remote idyll is soon shattered when Katrine is found drowned off the rocks nearby. As Joakim struggles to keep his sanity in the wake of the tragedy, the old house begins to exert a strange hold over him.
Joakim has never been in the least superstitious, but from where are those whispering noises coming? To whom does his daughter call out in the night? And why is the barn door for ever ajar?
As the end of the year approaches, and the infamous winter storm moves in across Oland, Joakim begins to fear that the most spine-chilling story he's heard about Eel Point might indeed be true: that every Christmas the dead return...