Aldermere Hall has been waiting for her.

Elisabeth Hargrove arrives at the crumbling estate to marry a man she has never met - a union arranged by a family that has been selecting brides for three centuries. She carries a sketchbook left by the fifth bride, filled with things no one was supposed to draw. She is an archivist. She reads what documents try to hide. And the sketchbook hidden in her satchel, left by a woman who vanished two centuries ago, is trying to hide something extraordinary.

In the portrait gallery, eleven paintings show eleven women in the same dress, wearing the same impossible smile. The twelfth hook is waiting. The dress is aired and ready. And the roses - hundreds of white roses that should not be blooming in late September - are warm to the touch.

The house is beautiful. Every account says so. Beautiful the way a jaw is beautiful when it opens.

Elisabeth is the twelfth bride of Aldermere Hall. She has not come to be consumed. She has come to read the house like a damaged manuscript, find what it is hiding, and end a three-hundred-year curse before it ends her. She has come with a plan. She has come with Annabel's sketchbook. And she will not make the same mistakes as the women who came before her.

But Aldermere has plans of its own. Something ancient lives beneath the roots of the estate - something that has consumed every bride who came before. And the house has never lost a bride it wanted to keep.

Book One of the Rootbound Bride series. Gothic horror meets dark fairy tale. For readers of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Shirley Jackson, and Sarah Waters. Arranged marriage. Enemies to lovers. Forced proximity. A house that hungers.