Ashes and Echoes
by Jo-Anne Van Gelder
Publication date: August 22nd 2025
Genres: Adult, Psychological Thriller
A missing friend. A locked estate. A note that says, I know what you did.
Three friends. One is missing. The truth won’t stay buried.
Mara hasn’t seen Elise in years—until a handwritten invitation pulls her back to the crumbling estate they swore they’d never return to.
But Elise isn’t there.
Her handbag is.
So is the daisy.
And a note that reads: I know what you did.
Now Mara and Jodie—the third in their fractured trio—are trapped. No cars. No signal. Nowhere to run.
The house is full of locked doors and old ghosts.
Every secret points back to that night.
Elise’s absence is only the beginning.
Some friendships end in silence.
Some secrets refuse to stay dead.
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PROLOGUE:
There were three rules.
One: Don’t ask questions.
Two: Don’t keep records.
Three: If something goes wrong, disappear.
Elise memorised them before she knew what they meant.
Before she understood what kind of house she lived in.
What kind of programme she had been born into.
What kind of silence the adults needed in order to survive.
They were never written down. Just repeated in whispers.
Embedded in routine. Hidden in the space between a closed
door and a too-long pause.
The files were kept in a box under Ian’s bed. Locked, of
course—but not well. She picked the clasp with a bobby pin
when she was twelve and didn’t breathe again until she was
fourteen.
Inside: incident reports, training forms, assessment notes.
Faces she didn’t know. Names she couldn’t place. Her own
wasn’t among them. That unsettled her more than if it had
been.
She never told Grace.
She told no one.
But she remembered.
Not everything. Just enough.
Just the names that seemed misfiled.
The dates that didn’t line up.
The symbols that kept reappearing—on files, in margins, on
lanyards and notebooks.
And once, scratched into the underside of a metal desk in the
old admin wing: a daisy. Faint, but deliberate.
She started drawing them, too.
On the inside of her sleeve. In the dust on her windowsill.
With steam on the bathroom mirror.
By the time she turned fifteen, she no longer trusted the
silence around her. She didn’t fear it, either. But she recognised
it for what it was—a tool.
On the night of her birthday, she wrote a single line inside
the fabric lining of her mattress, using the ink from a leaking
pen:
If something happens to me, it wasn’t random. And it wasn’t
right.
She drew a daisy beside it.
And smiled, like any other girl.
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About Author Jo-Anne Van Gelder:
Jo-Anne Van Gelder is the pen name of a Dutch novelist based in the Netherlands. Ashes and Echoes is Jo’s debut psychological thriller—a dark, emotionally layered novel about memory, guilt, and buried truths.
Jo lives with her partner, who is also an author, and their cat. She spends most days surrounded by books, coffee, and the quiet thrill of untold stories.
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