Synopsis:
Ingrid and her daughter Susan return to the Western Highlands of Scotland, staying at Strathbairn with Gertrude McCleod while their new home, a cottage by the loch, is redecorated. The very same day, the ghosts of Ingrid’s past return when Gertrude’s brother Miles arrives with his new bride and his friend Timothy.
When her former beau turned betrayer Hamish starts work on a barn conversion, Ingrid is desperate to leave Strathbairn. She rushes to move into the cottage only to find she is sharing her new home with a violent ghost.
Realising the haunting is somehow connected to Strathbairn and sensing that something at Willows Cottage must be returned, she makes every effort to discover what that it is.
While Hamish and Gertrude conspire to force Ingrid into marriage, Timothy becomes a regular caller with a romantic motive. With two suitors and two marriage proposals, who will she choose – and can she solve the haunting of Willows Cottage?
A gripping conclusion to a classic gothic mystery trilogy laced with dark family secrets.
Shop The Book: The Haunting of Willows Cottage
Shop My Stack: 2026 Books Read
The Haunting of Willows Cottage. That title haws my name written all over it. Gothic, mysterious, Scottish Highlands, a haunted cottage by a loch… I was in without hesitation. Thank you to Rachel’s Random Resources for having me on this tour.
The Story
The Haunting of Willows Cottage is the third and final book in the Strathbairn Trilogy by Isobel Blackthorn. It follows Ingrid and her daughter Susan as they return to the Western Highlands of Scotland and move into a cottage by the loch, only for Ingrid to discover she is sharing her new home with a violent ghost. With the haunting somehow connected to Strathbairn and something that must be returned, Ingrid sets out to unravel the mystery while also navigating two unwanted suitors and the complicated history of the community around her.
Reading Experience
I picked this book up assuming it would read well as a standalone but I do believe that reading the first two books would have given me a foundation of relationship context and depth that I was missing throughout this one. I think a lot of what felt lacking for me was likely built in those earlier books.
With that said, the reading experience was slower than I hoped. There was a lot of buildup and atmosphere and description in the first stretch of the book, and the actual haunting and the mystery surrounding it did not really come into focus until about half way through. For someone who comes to gothic paranormal fiction hungry for the haunting, that was a long wait.
Blackthorn writes with a lot of atmospheric detail. The house, the Scottish landscape, the mood of the setting are all rendered with care. The pacing leans toward the slow and deliberate side, which will absolutely work for readers who love to sink into a world gradually. For me personally, I wanted more momentum earlier on and I wanted the relationship dynamics to feel more built out, though again, I suspect that context lives in books one and two.
Characters
Ingrid is a character I think I would have connected with more deeply had I come into her story from the beginning. Susan, her daughter, frustrated me considerably throughout. She reads as quite spoiled and the adults around her consistently enable her without setting any boundaries, which became difficult to sit with as the story progressed. There seemed to be an implication that her strong connection to the house had some paranormal significance, but that thread felt underdeveloped and never quite landed with the weight I was hoping for.
Themes and Tone
The book has the bones of a classic gothic mystery. Dark family secrets, a haunted cottage, an isolated Scottish setting, a woman trying to untangle the past. Those elements are all present and for the right reader they will absolutely deliver. I just wanted more depth in the haunting itself and more of the mystery to surface earlier in the story.
Final Thoughts
The Haunting of Willows Cottage is a classically atmospheric gothic mystery that I think would reward readers who have followed Ingrid’s journey from the very beginning of the Strathbairn Trilogy. If you have read books one and two, the relationships and history that I felt were missing in my experience will already be there for you and I suspect this conclusion will land much more fully. If you are new to this series, I would strongly recommend starting with book one rather than jumping in here. This was not a bad book at all. It just was not the right entry point for me and I think that made all the difference.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this virtual book tour Rachel’s Random Resources .
My 2026 Book Stack:
https://amzn.to/3YQVeZC
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/ashleykbooks
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/ashmandak
Isobel Blackthorn is an award-winning author of immersive and inspiring fiction. She has penned over twenty-five books including a number of bestsellers. She majors in strong female leads and empowerment narratives.
Among her credits, Isobel’s biographical short story ‘Nothing to Declare’, which forms the first chapter of her biographical novel Emma’s Tapestry, was shortlisted for the Ada Cambridge Prose Prize 2019. One of her Canary Islands novels, A Prison in the Sun, was shortlisted in the LGBTQ category of the Readers’ Favorite Book Awards 2020 and the International Book Awards 2021. The Cabin Sessions was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award 2018 and the Ditmar Awards 2018. And The Unlikely Occultist: A biographical novel of Alice A. Bailey received an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Reader’s Favorite Book Awards.
Blackthorn is the author of the world’s only biography of Theosophist and mother of the New Age movement Alice Bailey – Alice A. Bailey: Life & Legacy.
Isobel has a background in Western Esotericism. She holds 1st Class Honours in Social Studies, and a PhD from the University of Western Sydney for her ground-breaking research on the works of Alice A. Bailey. Her doctoral thesis has been downloaded over 13,000 times.
Isobel’s first work, which she wrote in 2008, is Voltaire’s Garden. This memoir is set in the mid 2000s and tells the story of building a sustainable lifestyle B&B in Cobargo on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, which gained international attention when a firestorm razed the idyllic historic village on New Year’s Eve 2019.
Isobel’s writing has appeared in journals and websites around the world, including Esoteric Quarterly, New Dawn Magazine, Paranoia, Mused Literary Review, Trip Fiction, Backhand Stories, Fictive Dream and On Line Opinion. Isobel was a judge for the Australasian Shadow Awards 2020 long fiction category. Her book reviews have appeared in New Dawn Magazine, Esoteric Quarterly, Shiny New Books, Sisters in Crime, Australian Women Writers, Trip Fiction and Newtown Review of Books.
Isobel’s interests are many and varied. She has a long-standing association with the Canary Islands, having lived in Lanzarote in the late 1980s. A humanitarian and campaigner for social justice, in 1999 Isobel founded the internationally acclaimed Ghana Link, uniting two high schools, one a relatively privileged state school located in the heart of England, the other a materially impoverished school in a remote part of the Upper Volta region of Ghana, West Africa. After working as a teacher, market trader and PA to a literary agent, she arrived at writing in her forties, and her stories are as diverse and intriguing as her life has been.
Isobel has performed her literary works at events in a range of settings and given workshops in creative writing.
British by birth, Isobel entered this world in Farnborough, Kent, UK. She has lived in England, Australia, Spain and the Canary Islands. She now lives and writes in Spain. She is currently at work on two novels composed in Spanish.
Social Media Links : Website | Facebook | Goodreads | Instagram | BlueSky
Cozy Home Delight 
Leave a comment