DARK CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE · DARK ROMANCE
Arianna Fraser
As a former entertainment reporter, Arianna Fraser has plenty of fuel for her imagination when writing romance-suspense stories. There will always be an infuriatingly stubborn heroine, an unfairly handsome and cunning hero - or anti-hero - romance, shameless smut, danger, and something will inevitably explode or catch on fire. She is a terrible firebug, and her husband has six fire extinguishers stashed throughout the house. Arianna lives in the western US with her twin boys, an obstreperous little daughter, and sleep-deprived husband. She loves getting to know her readers. (source)
Legend lays the blame for the disaster on Mrs. Patrick O'Leary's cow, though the likelier suspects were a crew of young hooligans-neighborhood boys sneaking a smoke in the hayloft of the O'Leary's ramshackle barn at 137 De Koven Street on Chicago's West Side.
— from Depraved
Most acclaimed
Depraved
Even as a child in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Herman Mudgett was considered a lad with a future, a boy who professed filial devotion while secretly fantasizing his parents' deaths. By age eleven he was conducting secret experiments on small animals and strays, becoming skilled at disabling his subjects without killing them. In 1886 he appeared in the Chicago suburb of Englewood, Illinois, and introduced himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes to the wife of the ailing owner of Holton's drugstore. He was hired on the spot, and under his management the store prospered. But when Holmes's attempt to purchase the drugstore from Mrs. Holton went sour, and she sued him, she inexplicably disappeared - never to be seen or heard from again. As Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London, Holmes was building his infamous "Castle," a grandiose residence and veritable fortress bristling with battlements and turrets. He hired and fired a succession of workmen to build the castle, thus eliminating witnesses to its secrets: a labyrinth of trapdoors, winding passageways, dark dead-end halls, stairways to nowhere, bedchambers fitted with peepholes and asphyxiating gas pipes, soundproof vaults and torture chambers, greased chutes large enough to send human bodies from the living quarters to a cellar equipped with acid vats, a crematorium, a dissecting table, and cases full of gleaming surgical tools. Alternately donning the mantles of doctor, druggist and inventor, Holmes was also a get-rich-quick schemer and bigamist, with three wives and innumerable lovers - at least one of whom ended up a prize skeletal specimen, sold to a medical college for nearly two hundred dollars. But his increasing audacity and carelessness during his reign of terror led to his discovery and to "The Trial of the Century," in which Holmes finally confessed to twenty-seven murders. While he later recanted - maintaining his innocence until his final breath - he had already achieved immortality as the most monstrous criminal of his day.
Bedazzled
I wanted Tania. She was light. She was the lynchpin that kept me from flying into madness. My father taught Maksim and me with fists and cruelty that we were not allowed to want anything more than the life we were born into. When I was kidnapped and tortured by a rival Mob, I came out of it a different man. I was a fool. I'm covered in scars and now I truly see my place in the Morozov Bratva. There's no room there for happiness. There's no room there for her. But I can't let her go. Bedazzled - An Arranged Marriage Bratva Romance can be read as a stand-alone with a HEA and no cheating.
Mistaken
What happens after a mistaken identity, a kidnapping, and a terrifying chase through the woods? Something much worse. Marriage. Maksim Morozov is the billionaire Bratva King of New York City. He takes what he wants. Unfortunately, that includes me. That’s what happens when you’re in the wrong place at the right time. He thinks he will keep me locked up in his penthouse like a princess in a tower. He thinks I’m a commodity to be used, like the other women raised in his world. What's worse? Maksim Morozov wants to own me, body and soul. So, in the weeks between a Christmas wedding and Valentine's Day, he’s about to find out that owning me is not going to be that easy.