Wicked Little Things Book One
The Music Box
A Sterling Pyx Novel
Clara Hart trusts figures. Thomas Vale trusts beautiful ruins. Briarwick may prove the ruin of them both.
The Yorkshire estate is grand, neglected, and offered at less than half its original asking price. Thomas sees a family home. Clara sees postponed repairs, a chapel standing roofless among the yews, and an alarming number of rooms in which something might wait. They are to be married in June. Then a storm leaves the lower road underwater, and they spend the night.
Music begins in an empty room.
At Briarwick, mirrors are kept covered after dark. The housekeeper gives her warnings sideways. Lilies scent rooms that hold no flowers. And a small silver music box has no key, cannot be wound, and plays anyway.
Clara does not believe in hauntings. She believes in warning signs, bad accounts, and the reasons people go vague. Ordinary ghosts are expensive. But the beautiful woman appearing at the edge of the glass is proving difficult to enter in any ledger.
She has taken an immediate interest in Clara.
Some sins outlive the people who committed them. Some punishments outlive the sins.
And mercy may be the most dangerous thing in the house.
Kindle edition. Included with a Kindle Unlimited membership. Both links open the same Amazon page, which is where a Kindle Unlimited member borrows it.
The series
Wicked Little Things
Small silver objects, and the opinions they turn out to have.
Each book stands on its own: a different place, a different danger, and another object that will not explain itself. What they share is a world, a marriage worth defending, and a line on the title page that reads A Sterling Pyx Novel.
The title page does not explain that line either. The books do, slowly.
Coming next
Ghosts and Silver
Book Two of Wicked Little Things A Sterling Pyx Novel
Winter, 1907.
A silver brooch, French and old and pretty enough to be a wedding gift, has been making widows for longer than anyone has kept count. Port-au-Prince knew enough to hide it. New Orleans has made it fashionable.
Clarabelle and Thomas Vale follow it out of Briarwick.
Not every woman who wore it was widowed. Some were only buried.
A promise was made over it once. It is still being kept.
About
Donald G Ammons
Donald G Ammons served twenty-one years in the United States Navy, retiring in 2025 as a Chief Information Systems Technician. He spent much of his life in Japan, an experience that shaped his fascination with history, folklore, duty, and the things people carry with them across time and distance.
He now lives in Central Florida with his wife, Lily, and their family. When he is not writing, he works in healthcare information technology and can usually be found solving a problem, chasing an idea, or losing a fiercely contested Nerf war.
The Music Box is his first novel. He began it as a distraction from a graduate degree, and it got out of hand. His fiction explores haunted objects, imperfect people, and the uneasy ground between justice, mercy, and grace.