SHADOWS OF THE LAMP • BOOK 1

Spectres of Evershade Manor

By Vesper Starforge

At Evershade Manor, every stopped clock hides a secret, and love may be the only key.

Edwin Blackthorn arrives at Evershade Manor prepared for dust, debt, and the grim duty of salvaging what remains of his family’s estate. Instead, the rational gentleman-scholar finds clocks frozen at impossible hours, chimes sounding from silent rooms, and the ghost of a child beckoning from corridors where old grief still lingers.

Conventional answers offer him nothing, so Edwin follows whispers into London’s hidden night market and hires Julian Winter, an exiled mage with dangerous talents and little patience for aristocratic desperation. Julian expects a nervous heir and a decaying house. What he discovers is a bound spirit, a blood-soaked magical anchor, and a manor steeped in secrets the Blackthorn family tried to bury.

As ledgers, locked rooms, and haunted objects give up their fragments of truth, the curse inside Evershade begins to stir. Edwin’s Fae-touched inheritance awakens under pressure, Julian’s past makes him a hunted man, and the investigation draws them toward an occult conspiracy wider than either of them expected.

To free the dead, Edwin and Julian must trust each other before the house turns on them completely. Shame, inherited guilt, forbidden magic, and growing desire bind their fates together in a place where every clock remembers a crime and some ghosts demand more than vengeance.

Spectres of Evershade Manor is a gothic boys’ love fantasy mystery featuring a slow-burn MM bond, a scholar and exiled mage pairing, haunted manor suspense, Fae bloodline magic, occult danger, and emotionally charged supernatural romance.