Lendle

When historical novelist Thea Jameson travels to the old Scottish borders to the site of her latest novel for a book launch, she has a sense of being followed. Once she is settled in her accommodations and begins to explore what she believes will be a vacant facility, things are not as they should be. She is a writer who exhaustively researches her sites, and the interior of the castle is inconsistent with 20th Century renovations. Although she had been told that the castle was not open to the public until later in the week when the others in her entourage are scheduled to arrive, she hears voices in the Great Hall, and encounters what she believes to be a meeting of either the Society of Creative Anachronism or the medievalist reenactment group Regia Anglorum. In retreating to her room, she encounters a man on the stairs. He is dressed as a reiver and his crude manners match his dress. He speaks to her provocatively in lowland Scots and makes a teasing reference to her as The Green Woman, the castle's notorious ghost. When Thea eventually finds her room, she convinces herself that he was referring to her green Natori caftan and the effects of the greenish glow from the recessed lighting in the stairs and blames her uneasiness on too much ale at dinner. But on the following morning, she has a second encounter with a man who has been dead for four hundred years and who thinks she is the ghost, the first in a of chain of confrontations leaving Thea convinced she either has been administered a mind altering drug or trapped within a lucid dream.
While Thea seeks an answer to her altered mental state, in the bowels of the old cellars the spirit of its Otherworldly Guardian is aroused from the complacency of sleep by a sense of impending evil, a force which threatens not just Thea's 21st Century world, but events in 17th Century Britain and ultimately, the Cosmic Balance. While Thea confronts her own devils, the man on the stairs is awakened to a need to protect his castle from the dynastic aspirations of the Wizard Earl of Bothwell, and the Guardian in her aspect as the daemon Nemesis the Avenger prepares for battle on a Cosmic scale with her Otherworldly brother Erebus, in order to restore balance in the world. In an adventure which must either be a lucid dream or an onset of madness, Thea finds herself drawn into a world no writer could create, as her attraction to a dead man and her relationship to a daemon create an alternate reality that defies her understanding of Present, Past and Future, and in which the only time is The Now.
Novelist Root deviates from the traditional historical genre of her previous five books in a story evolving from the adrenalin rush of the annual NaNoWriMo competition in November 2013 into a full length stand alone novel that she finds uncharacteristic of her other writing, with a subtle sensuousness bordering on the erotic and a hint of fantasy noir. She offers The Green woman and its progeny under the pseudonym J.D. Root.