Stoneground Ghost Tales

Nine ghost stories drift through the misty fen country of England, each one stirred up by the Reverend Roland Batchel, rector of Stoneground and unlikely conjurer of the dead. Batchel is a gentle soul, a bachelor with antiquarian passions who cannot resist the pull of old churches, older graves, and the secrets buried beneath them. When he pokes around in the parish's history, he tends to find more than he bargained for: restless spirits, wronged souls, and the long shadow of crimes that no one living remembers but the dead have never forgotten. The fens themselves seem to breathe with old sorrow, their flat horizons and creeping mists the perfect stage for these quiet, unsettling encounters between the present and what refuses to stay buried. Swain writes with the comfortable authority of a man who knows his churches and his country lanes, his ghosts more sorrowful than frightening, more curious than cruel. These are ghost stories for readers who want their frights served with a cup of tea and a sense of rural English decorum.