From the USA Today bestselling author of Diavola comes a darkly funny, blood-soaked horror novel about the terrifying seduction of unlimited power.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Newbourne Park by Jennifer Thorne, which releases on September 29th 2026.
After years of caring for her dying mother, Martha Shaw feels empty, exhausted, and far older than her twenty-six years. So when her brother invites her to a weekend getaway at the opulent, two-hundred-acre country estate where his friend works, Martha reluctantly agrees. After all, what’s the harm? The owners and all their staff will be gone. Security cameras will be off. The house will be theirs. For the first time in years, Martha might actually have fun.
And it is fun, taking advantage of the historic mega-mansion and its vast grounds. Martha begins to feel human again. But when night falls, the rightful master of Newbourne Park returns—and she’s not alone. Suddenly, being caught trespassing is the least of their worries, because what steps out into the moonlight is something vicious. And hungry.
What began as a lark becomes a bloody battle for survival, where greed and morality collide—and a woman must choose to bow, break, or bite back.
EXCERPT
Sin One
Trespassing
The first time I came to Newbourne, my instinct was to run. My initial instinct. Note that this was before I saw the house.
I ignored it, the feeling, mainly because I didn’t want to ruin anything for the others, who were-
No, fine, it was more than that, more than not wanting to be the damp rag of the bunch for once in my life. I knew what we were doing was wrong, and that was a major part of why I wanted to do it. I wanted to break something, if only a law.
But it was a complicated sensation, that longing to disobey. As I sat in the back of my brother’s stiflingly hot VW Golf, pinned against the window by his girlfriend Lucy’s oversized and heavily perfumed luggage, watching Tommy leap out of the passenger seat toward the keypad, entering in the code that would open the vast iron gates, I did think, with mild hope, Maybe the code won’t work.
My heart jumped and sank, jumped and sank. Complicated, as I said. For his part, Tommy looked elated, as if even he hadn’t been completely sure his “foolproof plan” was, in fact, foolproof.
We were, it was beyond question, said fools.
Then I thought, more dully, What we’re doing is illegal. This is someone else’s house, not some mate’s holiday home or a hotel stay we won off a scratch card. No matter how Tommy had framed it to get all of us in this car, what we were about to do was squat, an act as undignified and ugly as the word itself.
And yet, that knowledge came with a frisson of, Yes, this is wrong. That’s exactly why I’m here.
I was hardly a lifelong rule follower up to this point-I’d done the requisite minimum of drugs and underage drinking in my relative youth, albeit less than the others in that car-but this was more than that. We were about to drive over a moral and legal boundary and into a new version of ourselves.
Or so I hoped. More than anything, what I needed to break was myself. The sad girl. The shut-in. So emotionally paralytic that I reread books, rewatched shows to avoid the panic of choosing new ones.
Perhaps that’s the real thing that kept me from bolting out of the car, jogging without a word of farewell down the A-road to the closest bus stop. No, I stayed stock-still as the fifteen-foot-tall gates swung slowly open, one out of time with the other, as Tommy bounded puppylike back into the car, and we drove through into someone else’s grounds.
Tommy reverently cut the radio while we glided through the property’s thick woodland, the silence adding to the theatrical introduction to Newbourne he’d no doubt envisioned when planning this little getaway.
“Holy Christ,” Lucy murmured low next to me, her blond head stuck out the open window. “This is fucking mental.”
She meant the place, not the plan, but either way, she was right.
As soon as we emerged from the trees, the rolling green of Newbourne Park bared itself before us, lazing languorously in the morning heat wave haze. Sections of the grounds elegantly gone to meadow, a lake that looked natural, several ponds more of the ornamental variety, farther down the valley were all the gardens: vegetable gardens; rose gardens; sharp-hedged, just-for-strolling-through gardens; and that was before you even got to the house, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at full-on, for fear that it would look back.
All the while my mind was already marking the boundaries of this place. The ways out. That tall gate, shut tight behind us. What looked like bordering drystone walls masking climbing plants-clematis, honeysuckle-climbing on what? Wire fencing? Were there any exits other than that massive iron gate?
I marked outbuildings in several directions. The gatehouse we drove past: “Empty,” Tommy cheerily announced. “Guards gone, cameras off. Same as last time. We’re golden.” Far across the parkland, a Tudor oak-frame sort of building, too overladen with ivy to assess its size from here. Overlooking the shining lake, a folly in the style of a Greek temple, columns, mini dome, and all. A substantial stable block directly before us, in the deepest part of the valley.
And then, of course, yes, my eyes arrived inevitably at the house itself, which drove all thoughts of possible escape from my mind.
Newbourne.
My first impression was one of scope, of the dizzying limestone breadth of the facade, the nearly one hundred rooms enclosed within. Next the age, older even than its baroque architecture, the sense that it had always been here and always would, that I and all other living things were as inconsequential to it as a bacterium on the back of a whale. It could swallow us and never even notice.
It took me longer to pick out details. Many chimneys of varying sizes. Balustrades, slim towers for bells, others for clocks, elegantly perched statues of eagles, wyverns, foxes, hares, stags, and wolves. An enormous front door I’d later learn was made of solid imported walnut but in the direct light of that morning looked to me like a lax, slick tongue.
Now, I realize I’m presenting an image of myself as a character out of a bad Christmas pantomime-wide-eyed country mouse first setting tiny foot in the palace, humbled and cowed by all the splendor! That’s an exaggeration. It wasn’t as if I’d never been to a house like this. Mum used to spend money she didn’t have on National Trust memberships for the three of us, dutifully exposing her children to the culture she’d been brought up with, taking us to dozens of beautifully preserved historic homes and gardens within an hour’s drive of our village, wincing stoically while Ian and I complained endlessly of boredom as we sat for soggy picnics in their orchards.
I wasn’t complaining now. This felt of a completely different order, because it was. This place was inherently exclusive, had been since the late seventeenth century. And Tommy wasn’t our gracious bloody host, no matter how much he was pretending to be, bless him. He wasn’t a guest, even, he was staff, and only barely that. He’d started working at the manor as a live-in footman, whatever the hell that meant in the twenty-first century, less than a month prior. Whatever his job actually was, it was frankly typical of him to risk it. Box-standard self-sabotage.
But that was just Tommy-a character, a laugh, full of joyful impulsivity-so wholly antithetical to the way I’d lived the past eight years of my go-nowhere life that I reckoned maybe people like Tommy and Ian and Lucy had the right end of the stick. Why not be a little reckless? Act as young as my actual age? Worth trying it on for a weekend, anyway. See how it looked on me.
I still might have balked, if it weren’t for the intense late August heat wave that had been baking me alive in my cottage back in Bintley. If the weather had been more bearable, or if Ian hadn’t invited me along, I’d have devoted that week to clearing out Mum’s belongings. Or trying to, once again.
Her armchair and bed. Clothes that still smelled of her, the pressed jasmine scent she wore. Her dog-eared books, her disorganized shoeboxes of photos. If I’d stayed home, I would have steeled myself to do it, this time, finally, and wound up crying on the floor of the closet, hitting the floor with a balled-up fist. For years, I’d kept everything in the cottage just as it was while our mother was healthy, even when it was clear that Mum was long past being able to read those books or recognize any of the faces in the photographs. I’d assured myself all that time that everything would be easier after Mum passed. It wasn’t. Six months post-funeral and it still wasn’t fair and it hurt like hell. I couldn’t find my way to normal.
My identity had been demolished when I took on the role of caregiver for Mum. Now that she was gone, so was what was left of me.
“Come with us. You need to get out of that house,” my brother had told me that night at the Carpenter’s Arms, his own “carpenter’s arm” slung around Lucy’s bare shoulders. “And it’ll be awkward just the two of us with Tommy. We need a fourth. You’d be doing us a solid, right?”
Ian’s guilt over how checked out he’d been during Mum’s long illness now manifested in him dragging me from the house out to the local pub once a week like clockwork. It was enforced rapport. We’d never been close, had nothing in common, and Ian wore unreliability like he was flogging it on Instagram. Even so, I’d learned to stop resisting his invitations. That night, Ian had brought Lucy along, so there had been two of them to corner me.
It was his girlfriend who’d cut to the quick in the end. “What else you gonna do, Martha? Stay home alone and cry while everybody else is out having fun?”
Ian snapped at her then. Still, I could tell he was relieved that he hadn’t had to be the one to say it. Lucy might have been a blunt bitch, but she wasn’t wrong.
“This will be good for you,” Ian said. “We’re all worried about you, you know.”
All? I’d thought, trying to tally up the people left on earth who might possibly care about me enough to worry. Nope. Really just Ian, and I wasn’t all that sure how much he actually cared, beyond a sense of fraternal obligation.
Then Lucy chirped, “Shots?” and if I’m completely honest, it was probably the Drambuie that followed that got me to say yes.
I’d pictured it that night on my walk home, the possibility of this so-called getaway. A big empty house, featureless in my imagination, except for light on water-Ian had said there was a swimming pool-and the quiet of the grounds. The prospect of dressing up for no real reason, space around me, everything clean and untroubled. A complete escape from my own reality. And a quality mattress. My God, I could not remember the last time I’d slept through the night.
Taking in Newbourne Park felt like the house was taking me in right back. Getting my measure. All of ours. It seemed to grow engorged as we drove up to it, and a sentiment grew in my mind along with it, so odd it scared me.
It wants me to come in.
And then on the heels of that bit of irrationality, a reminder to myself:
Only as staff, Martha. You’re a house cleaner. Places like this are not for people like you.
As if in agreement, Tommy put a cautioning hand on the wheel before Ian could steer us onto the front gravel drive.
“Let’s park in my spot,” he said. “That way, around the side, see those stables? That’s where my flat is.”
He glanced into the back seat to shoot me a reassuring smile. There had been a winsome, hopeful energy to him since he’d met up with us in Bintley that made me wonder whether this invitation had been his idea or Ian’s. I’d initially assumed, and with good reason, that my well-meaning, out-of-touch brother had put him up to inviting me, but the way he’d kissed my cheek in greeting, quickly, as if fearful of getting an electric shock, made me pause.
Once we’d parked, Tommy sprinted around the car to open my door for me, and that solidified it. This was a double date.How had I not seen it?
It wasn’t the worst idea in the world. I’d had a mild crush on Tommy back in secondary school, with his secret rollies and obscure (to me) taste in music. He’d grown into his looks a little now, in the fading days of his twenties, still lean and wiry, not much taller than me, but sharp-eyed and sly-angled. His smile was lopsided, and when he flashed it, it could set you back a breath.
I let my hand stay in his a little longer than I might have ordinarily as I stepped out into the stable block.
“Oh bugger,” Tommy said, turning around. “I was about to show you the horses but looks like they’re gone. Makes sense, I suppose, or they’d have kept the grooms on.”
“Riding holiday.” Ian lifted his chin, putting on his best toff’s accent. “How lovely.”
“Bit hot for riding, innit?” Lucy grimaced. “Last thing I want right now is a sweaty animal between my legs.”
“Bad news for me,” Ian said.
Even I laughed at that one.
“Oh my God.” Lucy covered her face. “Why am I always saying these things?”
I had a few theories, principal among them that it was entirely deliberate, but I refrained from saying that. I’d known Lucy in primary school, long before she got blond extensions and lip fillers, and I suspected she was a far sight more clever than whatever character she’d been performing for Ian for the past three years.
My brother liked this version of Lucy, though. Slung an arm around her and kissed the top of her head while she giggled.
Sensing an opportunity to pair off, perhaps, Tommy stepped shyly beside me and nodded at the second floor of the block. “You want to see my place?”
“You sleep in the stable?”
I didn’t exactly have a way with conversation, you’ll note. It had been a long time since I’d made any.
He laughed. “It’s nicer than you’d think. Not a hayloft, I promise. Come on.”
Lucy and Ian trailed us around the side of the building into a narrow stairwell that led up to a series of doors, like a tiny hotel. Tommy fumbled for a key, then opened the second from last, revealing a bright, clean apartment, more spacious than you’d think from the outside. A tidy single bed, a bathroom with a shower, a galley kitchen with a teakettle and a hot plate, a mini fridge.
“I never use it,” Tommy said, motioning to the kitchen. “Our house cook is amazing. Soph was on MasterChef back in the day.”
I felt an unexpected stab of jealousy at the affection in that Soph. Which was interesting.
“Don’t know why she works here instead of having her own restaurant, but it’s our good luck. Fridges in the main house are packed with leftovers, and it’s all fair game.”
Lucy looked dubious. “Like how left over? I’m not really up for scraps.”
Ian shushed her, which got her rankled. They dropped into a whispered argument, and I averted my eyes.
Excerpted from Newbourne Park by Jennifer Thorne. Copyright © 2026 by Jennifer Thorne. Excerpted by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
