The Echo in the Portrait

A historian discovers a painting that speaks through memory and sensation in this haunting Gothic mystery.

Dr. Aris Thorne studies the secrets objects hold. When a portrait arrives at her Cambridge archive, she expects a routine authentication. Instead, a single touch unleashes a sensory ghost—the taste of cheap gin, the smell of turpentine, the raw terror of a forgotten crime. The painting is a cry for help from Julius Metcalfe, a brilliant young artist who died in obscurity two centuries ago.

Thorne becomes obsessed, following echoes embedded in the paint—from a London cellar holding his lost works to a decaying manor on the Norfolk coast. With each step, she uncovers a story of forbidden love, a possessive guardian, and a murder disguised as misfortune. But powerful forces want the past to stay buried, and they will do anything to silence the portrait's truth.

Pursued by lawyers and haunted by a ghost's relentless memories, Thorne must risk her career and sanity to solve a two-hundred-year-old mystery. The key to the crime lies not in documents, but in the landscape itself—in a place known only as the chapel of the wind.

A chilling tale of obsession, love, and justice, where the past refuses to stay silent and history can be felt on the skin.