Kim Wilkins

Stand-alone novels:


The Infernal — (1997) Publisher: Australian musician Lisa Sheehan has got life sussed, but then, one-by-one, her fans start to turn up dead, their bodies hideously mutilated, and Lisa is haunted by memories that are not her own. Can these 20th-century murders be linked to events in Elizabethan England?

Grimoire — (1999) Publisher: For centuries magicians have compiled grimoires to call up demons. In Victorian London, an ambitious warlock called Peter Owling designs a book to summon the Lord of Demons himself — Satan — and thereby achieve eternal life. But not even his beautiful young acolyte, Christian, grasps the full extent of his master's plans... In twentieth century Melbourne, a group meets in secret at Humberstone College, dedicated to reassembling Owling's book. But there are others meeting at Humberstone, too: three postgraduate students drawn to the College's mysterious past, its gloomy underground labyrinth, and what they come to suspect are its current secrets. A beautiful young man appears to one of them in a mirror. He seems to carry a warning... but can his dreadful story be true?

The Resurrectionists — (2001) Publisher: Young Australian cellist Maisie Fielding is bored with her career and her overpowering, manipulative musical family. Faking a wrist injury, she takes time off to return to England, her mother's home country, to search for her own roots and to find out more about her grandmother, a 'white witch' who settled in a bleak village on the North Yorkshire coast. Maisie's mother is set against her going, and refuses to tell her daughter anything about the woman, other than that — even dead — she is dangerous. On her arrival in Solgreve, she receives a hostile welcome from her new neighbours and begins to find clues to her grandmother's mysterious death. Amongst the clutter in her grandmother's house is a diary written by a young French woman who eloped with a penniless English poet and settled in the village. Through this diary, Maisie discovers the existence of an unnatural presence which still preys on the lives of the people of the village, past and present. This book will appe al to the huge Anne Rice market: a gothic, romantic horror story with a credible, strong and extremely likeable heroine at the heart of it, backed by atmospheric descriptions of Yorkshire and a convincing setting in the music world.

Angel Of Ruin — (2002) Publisher: Sophie Black is a journalist who doesn't believe anything she can't see — until her latest interviewee tells her a tale of time gone by which Sophie can't seem to get out of her head. Three sisters, daughters of a caustic, blazingly intelligent blind poet names John Milton find their loyalties tested by the arrival of a fallen angel named Lazodeus. Set against the twin backdrops of the modern urban ritual magic scene and the bustle and colour of Restoration London, The Devil's Party is a tale of angels and devils, art and lies, and sibling rivalry at its most irretrievably complicated.

The Autumn Castle — (2004) Publisher: Berlin in autumn: Christine Starlight is living in an artists' colony sponsored by the art philanthropist Immanuel Z, himself a sculptor, in the crumbling urban shadows of the old east. Her lover Jude is a painter; his beauty and patience help her bear the chronic pain that is a legacy of the car crash that crippled her and killed her beloved parents. Out of the blue comes a crimson-haired beauty, who presides over a land where a witch dwells in a well, a wolf is the queen's counsellor and fate turns on the fall of an autumn leaf. For a brief span, the lands of faery and mortal man march hand in hand and Queen Mayfridh has taken the chance to seek out Christine, her childhood friend. But dealings with faeryland are never simple: as Christine yearns for Mayfridh's world, where mortals feel no pain, so Mayfridh in turn is becoming addicted to Christine's, where there are tastes and textures and the danger of forbidden love. And as secrets and jealousies and betrayals begin to unpick the threads that bind their lives, so yet another danger stalks them: the cruel and brilliant billionaire Immanuel Z. He too has faery blood, but he has a different use for Mayfridh and her kind: he is hunting faery bones for the grandest sculpture of them all ...

Giants of the Frost — (2005) Publisher: Victoria Scott, scientist and hardened sceptic, accepts a job at an isolated weather station on an island in the Norwegian Sea. She's running from a broken engagement and the knowledge that love is a lie. But there are shadows outside her cabin window, a hag who visits in nightmares — and a distrurbing sense of familiarity in the deep, haunted forest. In Asgard, the world of the old gods, Odin's son Vidar has exiled himself from his cruel family to await the reincarnation of his beloved: the woman his father murdered a thousand years before. And deep in the black, twisted roots of the World Tree, the three Norns spin and weave the fates of everyone. Vidar must escape his destiny, but the price may be more than anyone can pay ...

The Veil of Gold — (2007) Also published as Rosa and the Veil of Gold. Publisher: When an ancient gold bear is found walled up in a dilapidated St. Petersburg bathhouse, researcher Daniel St. Clair and his frosty colleague Em Hayward set out for the university in Arkhangelsk to verify its age. Along the way they are mysteriously set adrift. Maps are suddenly useless. Lost and exhausted they turn north, sinking even deeper into the secrets and terrors of the Russian landscape. Daniel's lost love, the wild and beautiful Rosa Kovalenka, fears the worst when Daniel goes missing and resolves to find him. To do so will mean confronting her past and secrets that she has fought to suppress. The only way to save him is to go forward, where she encounters the haunted Chenchikov clan, a family with their own shadowy tangle of grief, desire, and treachery. In the unknowable, impenetrable Russian forest, Rosa meets an enigmatic wanderer who is full of tales and riddles of times past. Who might hold the key to Rosa and Daniel's future — or the destruction of their world.