Bartholomew's Fair

Grief drives Jonathon Mayes from Duluth. The dead are waiting for him at Lake Pepin.

After his wife is killed without warning, Jonathon abandons their home, their business and the future they had planned together. His aimless journey ends near Wabasha, Minnesota, where he rents an isolated Tudor mansion overlooking the Mississippi River.

The Crowley House appears to offer exactly what he needs: solitude, beauty and freedom from memory. But the house has memories of its own.

A young historian is uncovering the story of Wilson Crowley, the nineteenth-century showman who built the mansion and dreamed of founding a settlement called Bartholomew's Fair. Crowley's fortune began in London's notorious fairgrounds, where vulnerable human beings were exhibited as curiosities-and one of his victims may never have escaped the house.

As Jonathon grows closer to Meadow Marthaler, a guarded young woman bearing profound losses of her own, strange visions, a vanished artist and secrets buried beneath the property draw him deeper into Crowley's legacy.

To begin living again, Jonathon must confront what the dead refuse to surrender.

Bartholomew's Fair is an atmospheric literary gothic novel of grief, haunting, historical guilt and the difficult work of starting over.

This version deliberately withholds the identities of the remains, the outcome of the relationship, the fire and the final revelations. It gives shoppers the emotional and supernatural promises without exhausting the mystery.