Petra's Ghost by C.S. Cinneide

Petra’s is not the only ghost

A physically and metaphysically grueling journey across the Spanish countryside on the Camino de Santiago, under the brilliant sun and deep in the shadows of Daniel’s psyche.

Tortured by his wife’s death a year earlier and unable to make any decisions about increasingly urgent matters in his family and business, he trudges through the days seeking relief from his grief and the nights hoping for oblivion. He meets, walks with, parts from other pilgrims, each toting their own burden of secrets and myths from their homeland, each seeking an elusive peace that may be in the next cathedral, at the next shrine, or nowhere at all. The nights and sometimes the days are haunted by memories and by visions of the Santa Compaña, the Holy Ones, who are doomed to walk the pilgrim’s way for eternity. Irish Daniel calls them banshees while trying to convince himself they don’t exist.

How much to reveal, and how much to hide, is an ever-shifting metric for Daniel, never more than with Ginny, the young American woman he gradually becomes more comfortable with.

“Safe topics that skirt around his life with Petra and her death, like pieces of a puzzle purposely left  out  of  the  box.  Harbouring  his  own  missing  pieces, watching for hints of hers.”  P. 105

The mystery reveals itself in fragments like the shifting views as pilgrims trudge around a hill: a blend of the psychological, spiritual, and potentially criminal. The unfolding story of Petra’s long dying seeps into present-day iterations of the dangers lurking for women unprotected. A young woman vanished on the trail, her body never found. A friendly Dutchman and an oafish Englishman have been there before; did they meet her, hurt her, kill her? Is she the banshee haunting Daniel, luring him off the trail into cornfields and graveyards? As the days pass and each night brings a new terror or temptation, he grasps for elusive facts. Even Ginny’s secrets take more ominous form in his mind.

‘Petra’s Ghost’ is a tale of love, loss, and guilt. The writing is mesmerizing, the scenery and customs of the Camino compelling as only first-hand experience can be.

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 C.S. O'Cinneide (oh-ki-nay-da) is a writer and a blogger on her website, She Kills Lit, where she features women writers of thriller and noir. Her debut novel, Petra’s Ghost is a dark thriller set on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, where a woman has disappeared. The book was inspired by real events that occurred when the author walked the ancient five-hundred-mile pilgrimage in 2015. 

 https://www.shekillslit.com/
  

 J.E. (Jayne) Barnard is a Calgary-based writer of award-winning women's fiction: The Maddie Hatter Adventures for daring spirits aged 10 to 100, and The Falls Mysteries, contemporary psychological suspense set in the Alberta foothills