Sisters of Sorrow is on sale for .99 until the end of April.
Warning: Violent convent, reader discretion advised. This story contains sadistic nuns, morally ambiguous witches, unhinged orphans, and an industrious living dead thing.
Anna Dufresne is a child laborer in a turn of the century shoe factory, hidden away in the foggy, brooding coastal islands of Washington State. The factory, which doubles as an orphanage, is run by the Catholic Church and serves as a dumping ground – both for orphans who are not welcome at finer institutions, and for nuns who have disgraced the church. The walls of Saint Frances du Chantal’s Orphan Asylum hum with secrets and buried scandal.
Since her arrival five years ago, Anna has been trying to escape. She has watched as her friends die of malnutrition and exposure in their deplorable dormitory halls. She has seen them maimed and killed by the heartless machinery of the factory. She lost her own little finger, not to the factory, but to the sardonic abbess in charge of Saint Frances’s. And the physical dangers pale beside the psychological. Anna knows she must escape or she will lose what little sanity she has left.
Anna finally gets an unexpected break when the abbess assigns her to clean the drainage tunnels under Saint Frances’s. Deep below the subbasement of the ancient orphanage, from beyond the iron-gated mouth of the drainage pipe, something speaks to Anna. She tells herself it’s a boy, but she knows better. The voice, Joseph, offers her a key, and promises freedom, if she will come to him when she escapes.
She accepts without hesitation.
In the five days that follow, as Anna prepares to flee, rumors begin to surface about a spy among the newly arrived nuns, even the possibility that a witch has sneaked onto the island. Anna hears whispers of grave danger coming to Saint Frances. She fears for her friends, but she has the key, and she has Joseph, and there is no turning back now.
Anna’s escape attempt triggers a chain reaction of chaos, shaking the orphanage to its foundation and laying bare its deadly secrets, calling back into being things long dead. Anna is forced to confront unearthly terrors in the swirling mist of the island, terrors from her past, and a truly unsettling mystery concerning the quality of her own soul.
Sisters of Sorrow is dedicated to the 796 children who died at the hands of the Sisters of Bon Secours at The Mother and Baby Home of Tuam, Ireland. May their souls find peace.