Lyndsey Hall's Blog

The Rose and the Serpent is coming 1 July and I’m looking for ARC readers!

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Death isn’t always the end, especially in the shadowed streets of York. Cassius Watkins has made his peace with the dead, unearthing their bodies for profit and keeping whatever treasures he finds. But when Cash pries open a tomb and finds Edie Buxton-Whyte alive inside, he’s thrust into a world where death is just the beginning.

Offered a place at the prestigious All Souls College thanks to his act of heroism, Cash soon hears whispers of a secret society hidden within the cloistered halls. As unsettling visions of Edie haunt his dreams and anonymous threats are slipped under his door, Cash is drawn deeper into a fight he never knew existed. A battle between the monsters that slither in the shadows and the forces working against them.

As darkness closes in and the danger turns out to be closer to home than they ever imagined, Cash and Edie must tread carefully. But the deeper they dig and the more they uncover, the more Cash begins to wonder if Edie is still the girl he risked everything to save…or something else entirely.

The Rose and the Serpent  is a YA gothic, dark academia fantasy brimming with dark secrets, forbidden knowledge, and a love that defies even death itself. Perfect for fans of  One Dark Window ,  A Study in Drowning , and Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter Chronicles.

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I hope you all enjoy my creepy but cute gothic fantasy with dark academia vibes!

Lyndsey

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Hi book friends! I’ve got another incredible fantasy pick for you today, I know I’m a little late getting to this one, but goodness am I glad I finally picked it up! And now my copy of book two has arrived, I’ll promptly be diving back into the world of the Shepherd King. If you’re yet to have the pleasure of meeting Elspeth, Ravyn and The Nightmare, this review is for you.

TL;DR It’s a darkly lush gothic fantasy with one of the coolest magic systems I’ve come across in years, and fairy tale vibes, but like, the Brothers Grimm versions…

ELSPETH NEEDS A MONSTER. THE MONSTER MIGHT BE HER.

An ancient, mercurial spirit is trapped inside Elspeth Spindle’s head – she calls him the Nightmare. He protects her. He keeps her secrets. But nothing comes for free, especially magic.

When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, she is thrust into a world of shadow and deception. Together, they embark on a dangerous quest to cure the town of Blunder from the dark magic infecting it. As the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly, darkly, taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.

For fans of Uprooted and For the Wolf comes a gothic fantasy romance about a maiden who must unleash the monster within to save her kingdom.

Title: One Dark Window

Author: Rachel Gillig

Link: https://www.amazon.com/One-Dark-Window-Rachel-Gillig-ebook/dp/B09QCCH9N7/

Format: Audiobook

Review: 5 stars

I knew I was going to love One Dark Window before I even opened the cover, the blurb absolutely sold it to me – a girl with a monster inside her mind? Highwaymen? Dark magic? And romance? Yes please! I ordered the paperback of book two as soon as I finished and now I’m desperate to pick it up (just as soon as I finish writing this review!).

One Dark Window is like Renegade Nell meets Wuthering Heights with added tarot cards and a thick fog separating them from the rest of the world, similar to the Fold in Shadow and Bone. There’s even an evil entity living in the misty woods that kills anyone who ventures too near without a talisman (rabbit’s foot, etc.). It was very atmospheric and the writing was descriptive but still fast-paced, which I loved.

The magic system was ingenious and yet so simple, using different cards from a special pack, called Providence Cards, created by the legendary Shepherd King. Each card has a different design and allows the user to access a different type of magic – but nothing comes for free, even magic.

Elspeth was the type of female main character I absolutely adore, still feminine but oh so capable, cunning and clever. Even when the Nightmare inside her mind wasn’t taking over her body and giving her enhanced abilities, she was still a brilliant protagonist with as much agency as an unwed young woman in a gothic novel can possibly have.

She’s been hiding her affliction from the physicians and Destriers (the King’s best cavalrymen, tasked with eradicating magic-wielders and anyone who succumbs to the infection that causes magical abilities) since she was nine years old. Magic, other than from the Providence Cards, has been outlawed by the Rowan King, so Elspeth is in a lot of danger if anyone finds out about the Nightmare…

Enter Ravyn Yew, mysterious and handsome nephew to the king, and Elspeth’s worst enemy. Because he’s the Captain of the Destriers, and he’s taken a special interest in our girl, for reasons known only to himself. And as the tension between them builds and their secrets start to come to light, Elspeth realises he may not be the biggest threat she faces. Because the Nightmare is growing stronger, and it’s only a matter of time until it overpowers her completely.

The romance in One Dark Window was *chef’s kiss*, Ravyn is a true gentleman, and a bit of a rogue when he wants to be. I’m looking forward to seeing the romance between them grow in book two, after all the longing stares and accidental touches, and that one scene (iykyk), it’s the least we deserve!

The world building in this book was absolutely incredible, Gillig has thought of everything and I was gripped by the explanation behind the Providence Cards, the Shepherd King and the mist. If you’re also a big fan of a detailed backstory, then you’ll definitely enjoy this about One Dark Window, there’s so much to the world, its history and magic system, and I really enjoyed learning about it all.

I’m dying to read Two Twisted Crowns and find out what happens next for Elspeth! I gave One Dark Window 5 stars, I listened to the audio book and burned through it in a few days, but my copy of book two is a paperback because I recently cancelled my Audible membership due to having too many audiobooks and not enough time. Obviously I regretted that immediately, but we move.

If you love gothic fantasy, historical novels and dark fairy tale-esque books, then this series is definitely for you!

I’m currently working on a gothic romantic fantasy called The Rose and the Serpent, so it was great for research. I can only hope that my next book will be anywhere near as atmospheric, captivating and swoony as this one! One can dream…

Lyndsey

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Hi friends! I’m really excited to tell you my next novel is now up for preorder on Amazon! *cue confetti and party poppers*

The Rose and the Serpent is a historical gaslamp fantasy, perfect for fans of Stalking Jack the Ripper, A Darker Shade of Magic and Shadowhunters. With a charmingly roguish male lead, a feisty, brave (but possibly undead) alderman’s daughter, and a mysterious organisation operating in the shadows, threatening everything they hold dear…

In 1833, death stalks the cobbled streets of York, England. And Cassius Watkins couldn’t be happier.

As a resurrectionist, Cash spends his nights disinterring the recently deceased and selling the cadavers to the anatomy school. And if the occasional gold ring or jewelled brooch falls into his hands in the process, then all the better!

Until Cash digs up the wrong grave and finds that the rebellious daughter of the local alderman isn’t quite dead. In fact, she’s very much alive, and has no recollection of how she came to be entombed.

As interest in the occult grows behind the elegant façade of the northern town, all manner of charlatan and cunning man come to prey on the desperate and gullible. But someone is taking the charade a step too far.

With threats around every corner and no one left to trust, Cash and Edie set off on a dangerous path to uncovering the truth. That is, if they don’t peer into the wrong shadow and come face to face with the devil himself.

Perfect for fans of Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices and The Last Hours, and Enola Holmes.

If that sounds up your alley, you can preorder it now and it’ll drop into your kindle on release day! The preorder date is set for June 2025, but I’m planning to release much sooner, hopefully before the end of 2024.

Happy reading, friends!

Lyndsey

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The day has finally arrived, over 300 fantasy books are now absolutely FREE! Head over to https://bit.ly/stuff-your-kindle-fantasy to find your next read and fill up that hungry little e-reader!

Can’t decide what to get? I have a couple of recommendations for you…

The Fair Queen (by me!) is a YA portal fantasy and the first book in a completed trilogy, so you can binge the whole series, and if you have Kindle Unlimited the whole lot are practically free! Win, win.

A few books I snapped up for their gorgeous covers and great blurbs are:

The Call of the Sea by Kate Schumacher (Arthurian – Adult)

The Storm and the Darkness by Sarah M. Cradit (Contemporary – Adult)

Secrets of Green and Gold by Jo Holloway (Contemporary – Young Adult)

Girl of Shadow & Glass by C.K. Beggan (Crossworlds – Young Adult)

Ternion of Tarr by Bethany Arliss (Dark – Adult)

Disenchanted by Brianna Sugalski (Epic – Adult)

A Thieving Curse by Selina R. Gonzalez (Fairy Tale – Young Adult)

And too many more to count! Pop over and grab some freebies:

https://www.authorcnnoble.com/s-y-k-f-e

Happy reading!

Lyndsey

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June is Pride month, so I wanted to celebrate by giving away my short but sweet sapphic fantasy story, A Fair Vendetta, for FREE!

Mena, a young Sylph, is orphaned at the hands of Celeste guards. Years later, she sets out on a quest for vengeance against the man who stole her entire world from her.

As Samhain, and the anniversary of her parents’ death, approaches, she meets her match in a young woman from the wrong side of the Celeste border.

Is her vendetta worth throwing away her one chance at happiness?

A Fair Vendetta is a companion novella to The Fair Chronicles. It can be read at any time before, during or after the main series.

Hope you enjoy Mena and Ainsley’s story!

Lyndsey

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I’m so excited to say the fourth Enchanted Anthology is out today! Enchanted Skies brings together ten authors to share tales of air magic and flying mythical creatures, blending fantasy, folklore and mythology for a spellbinding collection of stories that is sure to enchant!

As with all of the Enchanted Anthologies, this edition is raising funds for an environmental charity. All profits from Enchanted Skies will go to the Red Cross Hurricane Relief fund, to support communities affected by the devastating effects of hurricanes and tropical storms by providing shelter, food and comfort. If you enjoy reading fantasy stories filled with adventure, humour, magic and romance, why not pick up a copy of Enchanted Skies and help us to raise funds for a cause that’s close to our hearts?

High-flying adventure, magical mayhem, and new horizons are in the air.
Take to the stormy skies on the backs of dragons or the ancient thunderbirds. In this clean fantasy anthology, you’ll soar into fantastic realms and meet creatures drawn from myth and legend. A hippogriff, Pegasus, harpies, and so much more.
Inspired by tales from around the world, these short stories will propel you into adventures of murder, mystery, and vengeance. These award-winning, bestselling, and emerging authors will lift and inspire you and leave you wishing you had wings of your own.
Fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians series and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology will adore this collection, where every encounter is a battle for survival and a test of wills.
All profits from this anthology will go to the Red Cross to support hurricane relief.

Ayla Willowbark is the eldest princess of the Sylph Queendom, a territory known for its air-magic wielding fae and barren beauty. In the depths of grief, having been widowed in a vicious attack by their neighbours, the Celeste, Ayla bids the Sylph settlement farewell and moves to a remote windmill to rediscover herself.

When a handsome, injured stranger turns up on her doorstep in the midst of a terrible storm, she does the only decent thing and takes him (and his horse) in. Isolated and forced together by circumstances, it isn’t long before romance begins to bloom between Ayla and the charming Lord Egan.

But when the Celeste return to finish what they started, will Ayla lose everything once more, or can love triumph over evil?

We hope you enjoy our stories! If you do read Enchanted Skies, we’d absolutely love if you could leave us an honest review on Amazon, they help new readers to decide whether to pick up a book, and the more readers we find the more money we raise for charity.

Thanks friends,

Lyndsey

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Surprise! Me and the rest of the OUAP team are celebrating the most romantic time of the year with a huge sale. Grab each of the Once Upon a Prince books before Friday for just 0.99 each – that’s a massive saving of about $3 per book, that’s $36 across the full series!

Grab The Silver Prince by clicking the cover, and scroll down to check out the rest of the sale books:

Find all of the books featured in the 99c and free sale here:

Happy reading friends!

Lyndsey

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Hello Fair Folk!

If you’ve been around here a while, you might know about my email newsletter and the free short stories I give away to subscribers. If not, then now you do!

I moved my emails over to Substack in May last year and it’s been great, I really like the platform and I’m building a small but brilliant little community over there. If you’re not already part of it, I’d love for you to join us. I email every two weeks (sometimes more often around a release date) with a bit of an update on life and writing, and loads of book recs and bargains. Plus, subs are always the first to hear about sales and get ARCs.

Fancy being part of the gang? Sign up here:

Need a little bit of an incentive? Here’s what you’ll get for signing up to receive Letters from the Fair Realm:

When you sign up to my fortnightly emails, you’ll get:

A Fair Deception – a short fairytale inspired fantasy romance, loosely based on Cinderella.

A Fair Vendetta – a sapphic short fantasy story about a young woman seeking justice for her parents’ murders.

The Wyvern and the Woodwitch – a short romantic fantasy tale featuring a healer on a mission to find a cure, and an adorable wyvern companion.

Happy reading!

Lyndsey

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Surprise! The complete omnibus edition of The Fair Chronicles is free this weekend, go grab a copy now and enjoy binge reading the entire series with no interruptions.

Find The Fair Chronicles on Amazon

Wander into the Fair Realm, if you dare…

When Aria is dragged through the Veil into the Fair Realm by a handsome, silver-eyed boy and his band of fairy soldiers, she discovers she is the legendary Fair Queen, the subject of a prophecy that promises to bring an end to the centuries-long conflict between the Five Kingdoms.

With terrifying creatures on their heels, and a tyrannical king who will stop at nothing to prevent the prophecy from coming true, Aria will have to rely on her wits if she’s to escape the Fair Realm with her life.

But can she resist the charms of her dark and mysterious captor, or will the fae prince steal her heart?
This gripping omnibus combines all three books in The Fair Chronicles trilogy in one volume:
The Fair Queen
The Solitary King
The Fair War

If you do download it and you want to do something to say thanks, I’d absolutely love a quick review on Amazon or Goodreads!

Happy reading friends,

Love Lyndsey

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Okay, I just checked and I haven’t done one of these posts since 2019! Five whole years. That’s crazy (although the correlation with my son being born doesn’t escape me). But I thought it might be nice to put some goals for reading and writing in 2024 down here, if only so I can look back at them in another five years time.

I’ll give you a quick recap of how 2023 went for me, and then we’ll get on to the fun stuff!

I read the grand sum of 16 books in 2023. Even for me (a very slow reader) that’s quite low, I usually listen to a fair number of audio books, which means I can get through at least a couple of books a month, but at the beginning of 2023 I changed jobs and my commute was cut down to just about ten minutes each way. That, combined with the fact my son is now fully aware of what I’m listening to while driving, cooking and cleaning, has made it difficult to get through many listens in the last 12 months. As a result, I only got through 4 audiobooks last year. However, my darling husband bought me some wireless ear buds for Christmas, so I’m hoping to be able to listen much more in 2024, whether it’s SJM while making dinner or Fourth Wing while folding laundry.

In 2023, I read 5 thrillers, one non-fiction and ten fantasy novels. I also beta read a few books and short stories, all fantasy.

I wrote roughly 60k words in 2023 – 10k for The Wyvern and the Woodwitch, my story in Enchanted Flames, and 50k for The Silver Prince, my book in the Once Upon a Prince series. Despite being a lower reading and writing year, 2023 has been my biggest year career-wise so far. The Silver Prince release went so mind-bogglingly well, it’s my biggest release so far by about 5 times. So, all in all last year was still an enormous success for me and a huge step in my publishing journey, and I’m so happy with everything I achieved.

That pretty much sums up my past twelve months. It’s been a really big year for work, family and self-care, but I’m planning for 2024 to have a stronger focus on books and publishing, so let’s see what I’m hoping to achieve…

I plan to read four books a month on average, with a blend of paperbacks, ebooks and audio books. I really need to start working through my physical TBR, so I won’t be borrowing any books from the library this year (I’ll always be a huge library fan and advocate though!).

I’ve started putting a spreadsheet together to track my reading a little more neatly than on Goodreads, with columns for my planned TBR, genre, format and the dates I read each book. I’ll keep a note of my ratings and some thoughts, and I’ll try to leave a quick review for each one, on Amazon and Goodreads.

I haven’t listed all 48 books yet, I’m a bit of a mood reader and want to leave a bit of wiggle room, but at the moment I’ve got YA thrillers, Adult thrillers, YA fantasy, Adult fantasy, MG and Non-fiction books on the list. My first read of the year is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, and I’m really enjoying it, so I think I’ll read a few other YA thrillers at the beginning of the year, as well as finishing House of Sky and Breath before House of Flame and Shadow is released at the end of January.

I published one novel and one short story in an anthology in 2023, and my stretch goal is to double that. I’d love to write, edit and publish two novels, my short story for Enchanted Skies, and another short for my email subscribers. All in all, that might amount to roughly 160k words, but that’s just an estimate, I don’t have a specific word goal.

My planned WIPs include a sequel to The Silver Prince called The Golden Princess, giving Issy’s younger sister Livia her very own happy ending. That won’t release until the end of 2024, when TSP is out of its contract and I can rerelease them both together with new covers. My other novel length WIP is a historical fantasy for fans of Stalking Jack the Ripper that I’ve had in my mind for years now and can’t wait to write. I’d like to get that one out by the summer, but I also have When Skies Darken to draft and edit, and then I’d love to write something festive to release next Christmas just for my email subs. A short tie in story set in the world of The Fair Chronicles.

And those are my writing and publishing goals for the next twelve months. A quick note on the how, what and when – my aim is to write 500 words per day or spend some time either marketing my books or studying/learning every day. And I’ve also decided to read for 2 hours for every hour I spend watching tv or gaming. That should hopefully help me to get to my goals by next December!

What are you reading and/or writing goals for the next twelve months?

Happy new year book friends, I hope 2024 is filled with calm, joy, and lots of great books!

Lyndsey

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