Butcherbird

Butcherbird is set in rural New Zealand and is a supernatural who-or what-dunnit A book about family secrets and the way they come back to haunt you Readers who like spine-tingling tales and stories about secrets/uncovering truths will engage with this story A fast-paced psychological thriller that will engage both male and female adult audiences Will appeal to a literary community as Cassie worked on this novel when she took part in the Maori Literature Trust Te Papa Tapu programme Under the pseudonyms J.C. Hart and Nova Blake, Cassie has self-published and published with Paper Road Press short stories, novels and novellas Like Jena, Cassie had her own summoned-home-at-an-end-of-life moment: she wrote some of Butcherbird while sitting at the bedside of her dying grandmother.

Something is drawing Jena Benedict’s family to darkness. Her mother, father, brother and baby sister are killed in a barn fire, and Grandmother Rose banishes Jena from the farm. Now, twenty years on, Rose is dying, and Jena returns home wanting answers. Full of psychological thrills, this is a novel about uncovering truths and unshackling guilt.Something is drawing Jena Benedict’s family to darkness. Her mother, father, brother and baby sister are killed in a barn fire, and Grandmother Rose banishes Jena from the farm. Now, twenty years on, Rose is dying, and Jena returns home wanting answers about what really happened on the night of the fire and why she was sent away.

Will, Rose’s live-in caregiver, has similar questions. He hunts for the supernatural, and he knows something sinister lurks in the Benedict homestead. Together, Jena and Will unearth the mysteries around a skull, a pocket-watch, a tale of the Dark Man and a tiding of magpies. And in doing so, they set loose an evil entity determined to destroy Rose and her whole clan.

Full of tension and psychological thrills, Butcherbird is a novel about uncovering truths and unshackling guilt.