Mystery and Thriller Stories to Read Online, Free Chapters
These family mysteries are built chapter by chapter, each ending on a new clue: a photo of a girl with Ingrid's face taken the year before she was born, a room bricked shut for fifty years, and an old patient who tells a night nurse her grandfather did not drown. The first 8 chapters are free.
The Room Grandmother Sealed
Harriet Lowell
The Room Grandmother Sealed
Family Mystery · 12 chapters · Complete
Iris Calloway inherits her grandmother's stone house in a quiet village, along with one strict instruction: never open the room at the top of the stairs. The door has been bricked over for fifty years. The village knows why. Nobody will tell her.
Read chapter 1 free
Questions readers ask
Are these scary?
They are suspense, not horror. The tension comes from family secrets and what the heroine might find, not from gore.
How long is each story?
Each book is 12 chapters of about 1,000 words, roughly five minutes a chapter, so a whole story fits into an evening or a week of commutes.
Are they free?
The first 8 chapters of every book are free to read in your browser, with no app and no account. After chapter 8 you choose how to keep going: a monthly pass for every book, a short ad for one chapter, or buying that one book.
Which is the best first read?
The Girl in the Lake House Photo if you like an impossible photograph, Bed Twelve for a cold case on a hospital night shift, and The Room Grandmother Sealed for an inherited house with one forbidden door.