Novel
The Fourth Girl
A Gothic Dark Academia Mystery of Secrets, Scandal, and a Scholarship Girl Who Won't Stay Quiet
Every year, one scholarship girl stays behind at Duncarragh College when the causeway floods.
This year, it's Ivy Doherty's turn.
Perched on a cliff-top headland on the wild Donegal coast, Duncarragh College has kept its secrets since 1848 — and none more carefully than what really happened to Bríd Lawlor, the school's first scholarship pupil, who drowned on the rocks below the cliff path forty years ago. The official story is that it was an accident. Ivy is starting to believe it wasn't.
When a scholarship of her own puts her under the same kind of scrutiny Bríd once faced, Ivy finds a hidden notebook, a closed-ranks secret society calling itself the Wreckers' Table, and a headmaster who has spent four decades making sure nobody asks the right questions. The only people willing to help her are a best friend who won't let her go it alone, a fisherman's son from the mainland who keeps showing up exactly when she needs him, and — improbably — the one girl at Duncarragh with every reason to protect the school's secrets instead of her.
As the Midwinter Watch approaches and the causeway floods again, Ivy has to decide how far she's willing to go to make sure she isn't the fourth girl this school quietly erases.
A clean, slow-burn YA gothic mystery about institutions that protect themselves instead of the people inside them — and the girls who refuse to stay quiet about it.