Coming Soon – December 16, 2025

The Lies We Inherit: A Novel of Memory and Madness

Every house remembers. Every silence leaves testimony. And every inheritance comes with a cost.

In her stunning debut novel, Angela R. Key delivers a Gothic thriller that marks a new era for Crown Cipher Publishing — a work of psychological suspense as precise as a forensic report and as haunting as a whispered secret.

The Lies We Inherit follows Elise Miriam Scott, a forensic specialist who returns home expecting nothing more than the ritual of her father’s will. Instead, she inherits two estates — Ashdown and Northbridge — and with them a legacy of curated silences. A hospital bracelet bearing her name. A ledger marked Room 237. A key that unlocks doors she has no memory of entering.

Her family insists she forgets. Her brother insists she lies. Her mother smiles and denies everything. But the houses she now owns insist otherwise. Ashdown and Northbridge are not haunted — they are curated. And they have been waiting for Elise to arrive.

With forensic precision and Gothic atmosphere, Key explores what happens when memory becomes a crime scene, and silence is weaponized across generations. The result is a novel that stands firmly in the lineage of Shirley Jackson and Gillian Flynn, while forging its own territory as a powerful new Black voice in the Gothic thriller tradition.

The Lies We Inherit is more than a novel — it is a flagship release for Crown Cipher Publishing, a house committed to stories that refuse compromise, that expose the fractures beneath power, and that prove literature can be both visceral and enduring.

Angela R. Key’s voice is not an echo; it is an arrival. And with The Lies We Inherit, she takes her place as one of the defining authors in Crown Cipher’s growing legacy.