In Your Heart a Devil

by Vanessa Santos

Inspired by local Scottish folklore, In Your Heart a Devil is a gothic tale of love and alienation, full of loneliness, yearning, and the unholiest of unions. For years bonfires have been lit by superstitious villagers in the town of S – , intended to ward off the spirit of the man who was once their Laird. His widow still watches from the window of the big empty house on the hill. Isabel has heard the rumours about her husband, but only she knows what went on behind closed doors. Because behind every enigmatic man there is a woman with a heart full of secrets. It was decades ago that she left her grief-shadowed home in Portugal and began her search for her father. As her investigation led her to the rugged landscapes of Scotland, she couldn’t have foreseen the dark heart that was to win over her own. Misled into a loveless marriage and confined to a dark manor so unlike the sun-drenched home she left behind, she quickly came to know the sharp pulse of longing and the deeper wound of rejection. And then He arrived; a man so different from anyone she’d met before, a man the villagers feared, a man who evoked the burning desire in her husband that she had so ached for. A gothic tale of unrequited longing and unfathomable betrayal, In Your Heart a Devil beckons readers through unforgiving halls where servants whisper and shadows stir, into chambers where forbidden vows are bound in candlelight; and into the heart of a woman who is ready to emerge from her husband’s mythologised shadow to tell her own story.