Belladonna

Belladonna is the first novel of Adalyn Grace's Belladonna series, published in 2022 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and Hodder & Stoughton. It is a gothic fantasy mystery set at Thorn Grove, an estate that is both glittering and gloomy, in a world where ghosts are real, Death is a presence rather than an idea, and the line between the living and the dead is a matter of etiquette rather than impossibility.

Signa was orphaned as a baby and raised by a succession of guardians who cared more about her inheritance than about her, and every one of them has died. Her last living relatives are the Hawthornes, an eccentric family at Thorn Grove. The patriarch is drinking his way through his grief, his son is fighting for what is left of the family's reputation, and his daughter is ill in a way no doctor can name and the household has decided not to discuss.

When the children's dead mother appears to Signa insisting that she was poisoned, Signa starts asking questions in a house that would rather she did not. Her own history is part of the problem: Signa has a connection to death that has followed her through every guardian's house, and it makes her both the obvious suspect and the only person able to get an answer. Death himself takes an interest in her progress, and his interest is not entirely professional.

The series continues in Foxglove and Wisteria, and the first novel establishes Thorn Grove, the Hawthorne family and Signa's unusual relationship with dying. It is a gothic mystery with a romance at its centre, and it is written as the first of a series rather than a standalone, with each volume moving Signa to a different house and a different question.