Publication: 22nd January 2026 – Penguin MichaelJoseph
It all started with a game of hide and seek.
The four Esmie children were playing together when the youngest brother, Ben, went off to hide, and was never seen again.
That was long ago. It’s been eighteen years since the siblings fled their childhood home, Fell House, the one that holds all the ghosts of the past. They’ve built separate lives, but all of them carry the psychological scars of that fateful day.
But then Violet receives a call from the house’s caretaker. He’s too scared to keep working there. He says he saw the spirit of a young boy whispering two words . . .
Come home.
A Box Full of Darkness is yet another chilling, dark, and completely addictive story from one of my favourite authors, Simone St. James. I am not a huge reader of paranormal thriller novels. It’s actually not a genre that I read at all, but for Simone St. James I always make an exception. This was such an exciting read, especially when I discovered that it’s set in the same town as my favourite of her novels, The Sun Down Motel.
Set in the town of Fell, New York, this is the story of three siblings who, after eighteen years away, return home to discover, once and for all, what happened to their younger brother many years earlier. There is the oldest, Violet, with the gift of seeing ghosts and with a teenage daughter who she barely sees and an ex-husband who loves to blame her for everything that went wrong in their family; Vail, an UFO investigator who never stays long anywhere; and the youngest one, Dodie, a shampoo model who never goes on second dates. The three siblings have been estranged for years, but there is one person who can bring them together: their younger brother Ben, who disappeared suddenly when he was six years old and was never found. So, when someone claims to have seen a child in their family home, closed since their parents’ deaths many years before, they pack their bags without a second thought and return to Fell to discover what happened to Ben. However, Ben’s death is not the only strange thing that happened in town and returning home means also revisiting the memories, good and bad, from the past.
I loved A Box Full of Darkness, it kept me on the edge of my seat from the first to the last page. There is a haunted house (and also, let’s say, a haunted town), mysterious deaths, ghosts (one in particular who was very aggressive), but also grief and coming to terms with the past. A Box Full of Darkness is a gripping, spooky, well-written read that left me looking forward to the author’s next novel!
A huge thank you to MichaelJoseph and Netgalley for providing me with a proof of this fantastic novel.
Simone St. James is the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Cold Cases and The Sun Down Motel. She spent twenty years behind the scenes in the television business before leaving to write full-time.. Her debut novel, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, won two RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America and an Arthur Ellis Award from Crime Writers of Canada. Simone spent twenty years behind the scenes in the television business before leaving to write full-time. She lives just outside of Toronto, Canada with her husband and a spoiled rescue cat.
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