Crystal Lake Publishing welcomes Jes Hart Stone.
Jes writes dark psychological suspense featuring deeply troubled, yet strong, female leads. Her award-winning novels explore themes of oppression and revenge, fear, courage, hidden desires, and the struggle to assert female agency in a male-dominated world.
Jes hosts Her Poison Pen—a YouTube channel for women who create and consume dark fiction. Her Poison Pen airs every new and full moon in 2026.
Living bi-locationally, Jes divides her time between a seaside town in the Pacific Northwest and a Pueblo Mágico in the mountains of Mexico.
Jes’ novel, Then We’ll Be Safe, will be released in 2026.
Then We’ll Be Safe:
Crystal Lynn Harsh takes revenge on her mother’s abusive boyfriend by pruning his fingers with a pair of loppers. She then sets fire to her home and escapes into the night. Majorca Fairhaven catches her boyfriend cheating and pushes his car into a lake. She is unaware that an infant is strapped into the back seat of the vehicle.
Running away, the girls meet on a dark stretch of highway. Although strangers from very different backgrounds, they bond as they flee from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Hitchhiking on Canada’s most dangerous road, the Highway of Tears, the girls engage in escalating crimes of delinquency and violence. To avoid the police, they leave the highway and begin a horrific journey through a dense and threatening forest. While fighting her own demons, a female RCMP constable risks everything in her attempt to save the girls.
Then We’ll Be Safe, set in British Columbia in 1974, is a dark psychological suspense story about childhood pain, abuse, and neglect, and about the lies we tell ourselves in our desperate need to be loved.