What Is The Setting Of 'In The First Circle'?

After her father’s brutal murder, Natalie Pierce is forced into a life she never asked for. Her uncle steps in as guardian and pulls strings to secure her a spot at Cainebrielle University—a school built for the elite, the powerful, and the 0.1% who rule their secretive world. Her father never wanted her there. Now, she understands why. Because Cainebrielle doesn’t just teach ancient myth—it lives it. And monsters don’t hide in the dark here. They walk the halls, cloaked in beauty and danger. Natalie never believed in legends... until she met Adrian—the devastatingly seductive man with eyes that promise ruin and lips that taste like sin. He’s more than a student. More than a man. He’s something other. And he wants her. Badly. Adrian isn’t supposed to crave her. Natalie isn’t supposed to burn for him. But the heat between them threatens to consume everything—and everyone—around them. Because their bond isn’t fate. It’s a threat. To fall for him is to challenge bloodlines, defy ancient law, and risk waking a power buried long before she was born. But some flames aren’t meant to be tamed. Some touches aren’t meant to be denied. And some loves? They were made to set the world on fire. Sink your teeth into this steamy, forbidden vampire romance where the rules were made to be broken—and desire always wins.

Bound to the First Blood Elara Ashbourne is a rare hybrid born of two powerful bloodlines, a witch mother and a werewolf father. Living a quiet life in a small village with her parents and her sickly younger sister, Lyra, Elara never imagined that her fate was tied to the supernatural world's most feared ruler. When her family falls into an overwhelming debt they cannot repay, an unexpected offer arrives from the First Blood Vampire, the immortal king of all vampires. In exchange for clearing the debt, he demands Elara's hand in marriage. Desperate to protect her family and save her sister, Elara sacrifices her freedom and agrees. Thrown into a world of dark castles, ancient secrets, and deadly court politics, Elara becomes the fifth wife of a powerful vampire who seeks her not for love, but for the immense power hidden within her hybrid blood. Surrounded by his four mysterious vampire wives, each possessing unique abilities and ambitions, Elara must learn whom she can trust. As long-forgotten prophecies awaken and enemies rise from the shadows, Elara discovers that she is far more than a pawn in a political bargain. Bound by duty, tested by betrayal, and hunted for her power, she may become the key to changing the fate of vampires, werewolves, and witches forever.

Eidolon Avenue: Where the secretly guilty go to die. One building. Five floors. Five doors per floor. Twenty-five nightmares feeding the hunger lurking between the bricks and waiting beneath the boards. The sequel to Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast (“a great read...powerful and jarring” - Cemetery Dance) returns to the voracious Eidolon as it savors The Second Feast. A narcoleptic man in apartment 2A battles a vengeful past determined to rob him of everything as he runs from the barbaric disaster of a delusional love. A woman in 2B, reinventing herself to please a callous boyfriend, discovers the horrors that wait in the shadows of her self-renovation. The man in 2C, a teacher at the nearby Catholic girl’s school, collapses beneath the brutal consequences of his lecherous desires. An older woman in 2D, after decades dedicated to the church, is cornered at last by the grisly carnage beating at the hollow center of her faith. And a college student in 2E, hungry to escape an ignored life of invisible anonymity, finds herself captured between the pages of a ravenous book. All thrown into their own private hell as every cruel choice, every drop of spilled blood, every silent, complicit moment of cowardice is remembered, resurrected and relived to feed the ancient evil that lives on Eidolon Avenue. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Eliza Ward does not fall through time. Time bends toward her. Pulled from the present into Revolutionary America, Eliza becomes trapped in a landscape where history repeats unevenly, battles restart with variations, and memory functions as both anchor and weapon. She is not a chosen heroine, but a constant: a woman whose awareness destabilizes the moment itself. She meets Mercy Hale, a midwife and witch who understands time as a negotiation rather than a force to command. Mercy aids Eliza’s survival while refusing the role of savior, having already learned the cost of standing too close to history’s center. During a looping battle, Eliza saves Thomas Reed, a Continental soldier who does not shift when time does. Thomas is an anchor: steady, observant, unchanged across iterations. Their bond deepens in an almost-normal village where time briefly behaves. Eliza’s intervention triggers time’s response. Rather than immediate destruction, time collects interest. Mercy bargains to spare Eliza and Thomas, sacrificing her own future to stabilize the present. Time extracts payment from Eliza as well, stripping away her voice, the very tool she uses to name and hold moments in place. Silenced and unmoored, Eliza is violently displaced back into the original battle. Unable to anchor the moment, she watches Thomas die in the version of history that was always waiting beneath her defiance. Told in rotating perspectives between Eliza, Thomas, and Mercy, The Hours That Refused to Behave is a lyrical time-travel novel about revolution, restraint, and consequence, asking not whether history can be changed, but who pays when it is.

The novel is set in the modern time, its the year 2024 and Callie the protagonist is trying to get into a prestigious art school, she spends a whole day working on her canvas without food, sleep or even water and passes out on the floor, when she wakes up she’s in a familiar but not so familiar attic, same design and outline but the things in it weren’t hers, just as she’s about to completely lose it a boy seemingly two or three years older than her walks in and straight through her. She wakes up on her attic floor covered in paint with a splitting headache, she’s back to normal. She brushes the experience off as a lucid dream but more strange things start happening and Callie realizes that the world she knows is weirder than it seems

A town with a strange past. A group of teenagers with secrets to hide. A world inside a box and a man who should no longer exist. Will they ever find out where they truly belong?