Haunting Beauty by Erin Quinn

An ancient evil has taken everyone Danni holds dear to her heart. Can she go back in time and get everyone back without losing herself?

Danni has no memories before she was five years old. When she was five, she was left at her daycare and never picked up. She spent the rest of her childhood in foster care. Now twenty years later, Danni works in an antique shop, lives alone with her dog, and she is having visions. Danni recalls having visions years ago when she was little, but somehow she repressed them until she didn’t have them anymore. Now they are back, and Danni doesn’t understand their meaning. A handsome man guides her though the lush hills of Ireland to a cave where a man is holding his dead son, and a woman with two children is beseeching someone in the shadows.

Sean Ballogh suddenly appears after the visions start and claims he is there to take her back to her family. He states that they have been searching for her for twenty years and thought she may be dead. He inquires where her brother and her mother are, which stun Danni. She had forgotten she had a brother until Sean mentions it. Wondering what else her memory has suppressed, Danni starts to research her past on her computer. When she finds a newspaper clipping of Sean’s death, she is shocked.

Danni doesn’t let on that she knows Sean is a ghost, but she is upset that her attraction to him will come to naught. When he comes to her house again, he brings her a family heirloom, a necklace with silver and gold spirals encrusted with jewels. When he fastens it around her neck though, Danni and Sean suddenly find themselves plummeting down a dark hole. When they awake, they are both naked and in bed, and twenty years into the past. They’ve been given a chance to re-write the past if they can figure out how to before time runs out.

HAUNTING BEAUTY is a superb debut. The writing is seamless and written against a backdrop of Ireland in all its lushness and myths. Danni and Sean are passionate and full of vitality and depth. The mystery is well-turned and builds until the final, shocking climax. If you read one book this summer, don’t miss this one! Fantastic!