House of Twisted Shadows blog tour is through Rachel’s Random Resources and includes a guest post from the author. Check it out below, visit other tours with the schedule, share, comment, follow.
Book Details
House of Twisted Shadows
A HOUSE ON THE EDGE
A DAUGHTER DRIVEN TO OBSESSION
A FORBIDDEN LOVE
Winter 1962. Amelia Tremayne has spent the past ten years in London trying to forget the lonely clifftop house where her father was killed. Tyler House was built shortly before the Second World War on Cornwall’s stormy coast by a wealthy German outsider. Its most unsettling feature is a vast glass dome that bends the light, casting twisted, elongated shadows across the walls.
Amelia’s father, Douglas Tremayne, a noted historian, was researching a controversial book about Tyler House’s Nazi origins – and its links to powerful figures in the local community.
As Amelia begins to uncover the truth about her father’s death, she is pulled into a web of buried secrets – and into a forbidden love that could destroy everything she holds dear.
INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY
Praise for J.H.Mann:
‘Powerful, evocative and steeped in atmosphere – J.H. Mann vividly brings Cornwall’s wild, haunting landscape and its legends to life’ – Margaret James, bestselling author of the Denham Family Sagas
‘Vivid details of the landscape, eroding cliffs and crumbling house…the tension grips you and the atmospheric setting of Tyler House draws you in’ – Cheshire Novel Prize
Purchase Links
https://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Twisted-Shadows-Wild-Cornwall-ebook/dp/B0H2WRJDTJ/
https://www.amazon.com/House-Twisted-Shadows-Wild-Cornwall-ebook/dp/B0H2WRJDTJ/
Author Bio
J.H.Mann is an award-winning journalist and writer living in the South West of England. His second novel, The Echoing Shore, was a Yeovil Literary Prize award winner and the Adult Fiction Winner of the 2025 Selfies Book Awards at the London Book Fair. His third novel, The Silver Tide, has just been shortlisted for the 2026 Selfies Book Awards. He has strong family links with Cornwall. His novels are inspired by the many stories told by his mother and father and his own experiences as a shore-based volunteer for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). He lives with his wife, Nicola, and their lively whippet Patch.
Social Media Links –
Facebook – www.facebook.com/jason.mann.9047
Instagram – www.instagram.com/jhmannauthor/
Tik Tok – J.h.mann.writer (@j.h.mann.writer) | TikTok
Website: www.jhmannauthor.com
Guest Post
Why Cornwall Is the Perfect Setting for a Gothic Mystery
By J.H.Mann, author of House of Twisted Shadows
People often think of Cornwall as a place of golden beaches, picturesque fishing villages and summer holidays. Spend a little longer there, however, and another Cornwall begins to emerge. It is a land of towering cliffs, abandoned engine houses, lonely moorland, hidden coves and ancient legends. It is a place where history feels close enough to touch and where every headland seems to have a story waiting to be told.
That is the Cornwall that has always inspired my writing.
I have loved the county since childhood. My father was one of Cornwall’s early lifeguards, and many of my happiest memories are of exploring its coastline and hearing stories of shipwrecks, smugglers and remarkable acts of courage. Later, as a shore-based volunteer with the RNLI lifeboat service, I discovered another side of Cornwall – one shaped by the sea’s unpredictable power and by the resilience of the communities that live beside it.
Those experiences became the foundation of my ‘Wild Cornwall’ novels.
Each book explores the landscape, its people and the secrets they might be hiding.
An extraordinary real-life discovery prompted my latest novel, House of Twisted Shadows. While researching unusual houses in the South West, I came across the story of Knowstone Manor, an isolated mansion built by a wealthy German bachelor shortly before the Second World War. Rumours surrounded the house for decades. It was said that money from the Third Reich had helped finance the estate, though this was never proven. Questions also lingered about its owner after the outbreak of war. Like many German nationals living in Britain at the time, he is believed to have been arrested though what became of him is uncertain.
The house itself was eventually destroyed by fire in 1960, leaving behind as many mysteries as answers. The cause of the fire was never publicly established.
As a journalist, I have always been drawn to stories that refuse to fit neatly together. Every new fact about Knowstone Manor seemed to raise another question. Before long, the factual investigation had become something else entirely. My imagination began filling the gaps that history had left behind.
That was the moment the house in my novel – Tyler House – was born.
I moved the house from the edge of Exmoor in Devon to Cornwall’s stormy north coast, where a crumbling cliff became almost as important as the house itself. The landscape shapes everything that follows. The sea is constantly eating away at the land, just as the past slowly erodes the lives of the characters.
In House of Twisted Shadows, Amelia Tremayne returns to Tyler House after her father’s death, determined to uncover the truth behind the research that ultimately cost him his life. As she uncovers hidden papers, secret passages and long-buried wartime secrets, she realises someone will do almost anything to prevent the truth from emerging.
Although the novel is entirely fictional, many of its themes are rooted in real history. During the 1930s there was a surprising level of fascist activity across parts of Devon and Cornwall, a subject explored in Todd Gray’s Blackshirts in Devon. That forgotten history provided another strand of inspiration, allowing me to explore how secrets from one generation can continue to cast shadows over the next.
The most compelling mysteries begin with unanswered questions. Knowstone Manor provided plenty of those. House of Twisted Shadows is my attempt to imagine one possible explanation, weaving real history with fiction into a Gothic mystery of betrayal, obsession and forbidden love.
My previous Wild Cornwall novels have won or been shortlisted for major book awards in both the UK and the United States, but this may be the most atmospheric story I have written. If, after reading it, you find yourself looking a little more carefully at lonely houses perched on windswept cliffs, then Tyler House will have done its job.
House of Twisted Shadows is available in paperback and ebook from Amazon and other major booksellers. Amazon.co.uk : House of Twisted Shadows
