There is no bliss to be found in Bliss House. In Old Gate, Virginia, stands a grand house built by Randolph Bliss, a charming New York carpetbagger who, in 1878, shook off dire warnings to build his home elsewhere. For the ground beneath Bliss House is tainted with the kind of tragedy that curses generations, seeping through the foundation and sowing madness in its wake. His first and second wives, and his young Japanese mistress, Kiku, bear witness to Randolph’s growing insanity with stories of his cruel manipulations and their desperate struggles to find happiness for themselves and their children. Their desire to live and love and even take revenge also fills the house, triumphing even over death. Spanning half a century, The Abandoned Heart is the prequel to Charlotte’s Story and Bliss House, forming a trilogy of southern Gothic novels in which one haunted house begets haunted lives that echo over centuries. A haunting so powerful that even Bliss House’s destruction cannot kill it.

Death never did come quietly for Bliss House . . . and now a mother and daughter have become entwined in the secrets hidden within its walls. Amidst the lush farmland and orchards in Old Gate, Virginia, stands the magnificent Bliss House. Built in 1878 as a country retreat, Bliss House is impressive, historic, and inexplicably mysterious. Decades of strange occurrences, disappearances and deaths have plagued the house, yet it remains vibrant. And very much alive. Rainey Bliss Adams desperately needed a new start when she and her daughter Ariel relocated from St. Louis to Old Gate and settled into the house where the Bliss family had lived for over a century. Rainey's husband had been killed in a freak explosion that left her 14 year-old daughter Ariel scarred and disfigured. At the grand housewarming party, Bliss House begins to reveal itself again. Ariel sees haunting visions: the ghost of her father, and the ghost of a woman being pushed to her death off of an upper floor balcony, beneath an exquisite dome of painted stars. And then there is a death the night of the party. Who is the murderer in the midst of this small town? And who killed the woman in Ariel's visions? But Bliss House is loath to reveal its secrets, as are the good folks of Old Gate.

A short story, set in the world of Laura Benedict's Bliss House novels. Nicole Martin needed a job, and she certainly wasn’t daunted by the notion of working at Bliss House, an inn that has a reputation for being haunted. (And not your average distant footsteps in the hall, and orbs in photographs haunted, either.) When the inn’s owners ask her to stay overnight while they travel to Richmond, halfway across Virginia, she jumps at the chance. She imagines an epic girl's night of drinking wine and watching movies with her best friend in the grand old house, but when a snowstorm hits, Nicole finds herself alone. Bliss House is restless, and as Nicole's darkest secrets surface, the house will use them to try to make her one more victim of its deadly games. Set in 2008, Cold Alone: A Bliss House Story, is a quick glimpse into the terrifying world introduced in Laura Benedict’s contemporary gothic suspense novel, BLISS HOUSE. The second installment of the Bliss House series of novels is CHARLOTTE’S STORY (October 2015), set in 1957, in which Charlotte Bliss can only learn the truth about the man she married, and the death of her four-year-old daughter by letting the troubled ghosts of Bliss House lead her.

The fall of 1957 in southern Virginia was a seemingly idyllic, even prosperous time. A young housewife, Charlotte Bliss, lives with her husband, Hasbrouck Preston “Press” Bliss, and their two young children, Eva Grace and Michael, in the gorgeous Bliss family home. On the surface, theirs seems a calm, picturesque life, but soon tragedy befalls them: four tragic deaths, with apparently simple explanations. But nothing is simple if Bliss House is involved. How far will Charlotte go to discover the truth? And how far will she get without knowing who her real enemy is? Though Bliss House may promise to give its inhabitants what they want, it never gives them exactly what they expect.