The Queen of Camellia Court: Story 1 in the "Southern Gothic Suspense" Series

Queen of Camellia Court is a Southern gothic noir steeped in heat, guilt, and long-buried sins.Camellia Court is a fading roadside motel on the edge of nowhere, a place people come to disappear—or to be reborn under a different name. Its bungalows bake beneath the southern sun, its neon flickers at night, and its walls remember everything. Especially Room Six.

Mavis LaRue rules this crumbling kingdom with a steady hand and a watchful eye, presiding over a transient population of drifters, dreamers, war-haunted men, and women running from their pasts. But when a troubled stranger arrives during a violent storm, old secrets begin to surface—secrets tied to a murder that never truly stayed buried.

As memories fracture and loyalties erode, Camellia Court becomes a pressure cooker of paranoia, obsession, and reckoning. Truth seeps through the cracks like rainwater, and the line between protector and predator blurs beyond recognition.

Haunting, atmospheric, and morally complex, Queen of Camellia Court is a dark psychological suspense novel about power, identity, and the terrible cost of survival—where everyone is guilty of something, and no one leaves unchanged.

Fans of Southern gothic fiction in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and the shadow-soaked noir of mid-century crime novels will be drawn to the heat, decay, and moral rot of Queen of Camellia Court.