The Heiress: A Novel

The Heiress—a national bestseller and January 2024 Indie Next and LibraryReads Pick—is a dark, atmospheric Gothic thriller about wealth, family secrets, and the deadly cost of inheritance.

The novel follows Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore, North Carolina’s richest and most infamous woman. Once the victim of a childhood kidnapping and later widowed four times, Ruby lived a life shrouded in scandal and mystery from her grand Ashby House in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

After Ruby’s death, her adopted son Camden rejects his inheritance and estranged family, choosing a quiet life as an English teacher in Colorado with his wife Jules, who has her own troubled past. But ten years later, when Cam’s uncle dies, the couple is drawn back to Ashby House, where the elegant estate still exudes both beauty and menace.

As they confront Ruby’s legacy, long-buried questions resurface: Was Ruby’s childhood kidnapping what it seemed? What really happened to her four dead husbands? And why did she choose to adopt Cam?

Haunted by secrets and twisted family ties, Jules and Cam soon realize that some inheritances come with deadly strings attached, and that Ruby’s influence reaches far beyond the grave.