Aunt Marge is women's fiction and suspense, with touches of Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, and other classic tales that are close to gothic in mood. 

Grumpy people abound in literature, from Ove in A Man Called Ove to Minnie Jackson in The Help to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Why they are grumpy and how/if they overcome that is a gold mine of storytelling possibilities. Aunt Marge is a woman we often don't like. Putting Gwen, a vulnerable character, in her orbit juxtaposes the two, and we wait for Marge to reveal her true self. Is she as mean as she appears, or is she worse? 

As I wrote this book, I worried that the reveal of Aunt Marge's background went too far. Would readers believe it? Knowing such incidents are possible, I went with it. Only a few weeks after the book's release, a reader contacted me to say that her husband's sister had suffered in almost exactly the same way. Her post-trauma reaction was to stay home and avoid people. That made me sad, but it erased the doubts I'd had about how believable the terrors in the story are.

Again here I had the help of a friend, who read the manuscript to assure that my Upper Peninsula of Michigan is realistic. It's a unique place, and I Iove it, but I wanted a resident to make sure I didn't get anything wrong about farming, community, or everyday life there.

Aunt Marge begins with Gwen, who's a wreck, being invited to stay with an aunt she's never met in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. While her aunt isn't particularly warm or kind, she claims that Gwen will recover her physical and emotional health on her farm. Soon Gwen is wondering whether she's been drawn into a sinister plan from which there's no escape. This book is available here for $2.99