#GuestPost ~ Bernadette Bernson tells us about her soon to be released #crimefiction novel set in Whitby #TuesdayBookBlog #BookSky💙 #BookX

Why Whitby Is More Than a Gothic Backdrop

by Bernadette Bernson

Whitby is a place that seems to remember everything.

Its ruined abbey watches over the town from the East Cliff. Below it, narrow streets twist between old buildings, the harbour opens towards the North Sea, and 199 worn steps connect the town with centuries of faith, loss and legend. It is beautiful, certainly – but its beauty has shadows.

That was what drew me to Whitby as the setting for THE WHITBY PROTOCOL.

The town is inseparable from its Gothic associations, most famously through Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Yet I did not want Whitby to serve merely as a picturesque or appropriately sinister background. In my novel, the landscape is not passive scenery. It conceals, isolates and remembers. It affects the way the characters move, think and investigate. At times, it almost seems to observe them.

Detective Constable Martha Rowe arrives in Whitby after a failed undercover operation in Sheffield. She hopes that a transfer to the coast will offer her a quieter life and the chance to leave the past behind. Whitby, however, is not a place where the past stays buried.

When the demolition of an abandoned research institute near Goathland uncovers a sealed box containing redacted files and photographs of unidentified people, Martha is drawn into an investigation that stretches far beyond the town. The trail leads through Whitby and across the North York Moors, into remote places where help is never close and where silence can feel less like an absence of sound than a warning.

The contrast between the town and the surrounding landscape became central to the novel. Whitby can be busy, colourful and welcoming, filled with visitors and familiar landmarks. Only a short distance away, the moors feel vast and exposed. The Hole of Horcum, the wooded coast at Hayburn Wyke and the road towards Goathland each create a different kind of isolation. Someone may be watched without knowing it. Evidence may remain hidden for years. A person can disappear into the landscape – or emerge from it carrying a secret.

I was also fascinated by the tension between Whitby’s visible history and the modern threat at the heart of the story. Gothic fiction has long explored fears of invasion, loss of control and the corruption of the self. THE WHITBY PROTOCOL brings those anxieties into the present through covert research, manipulated memories and a clandestine organisation called PALISADE. The danger does not come from the supernatural, but from people with the power to decide which truths should be preserved and which should be erased.

For Martha, the investigation gradually becomes personal. As she searches for the identities of missing test subjects, she is forced to confront the possibility that her own memories may not be entirely hers.

Whitby gave me precisely the atmosphere this story needed: beauty edged with unease, history that refuses to remain silent and a landscape capable of keeping secrets.

In this novel, Whitby is not simply where the mystery takes place.

It is part of the mystery.

About the Book

WHITBY KEEPS ITS DEAD TO ITSELF.

Detective Constable Martha Rowe was never supposed to make it out alive.

Transferred to Whitby after a failed undercover operation, Martha hopes for a fresh start. Instead, she uncovers traces of a secret research programme that officially never existed.

Redacted files. Missing test subjects.

The body of an unidentified young woman, found on the moors.

The deeper Martha digs, the more disturbing the picture becomes.

Because every trail leads back to an organisation known as PALISADE.

And to her.

Then Martha uncovers something more terrifying than anything she has faced before:

A neural implant was inserted without her knowledge – developed by the same clandestine organisation that may have decided which memories she was allowed to keep and which were meant to disappear forever.

By the time Martha realises that her past may have been built on lies, it is already too late.

Because the greatest danger is not the conspiracy she is trying to expose.

It’s the possibility that she was part of the experiment all along.

About the Author

Bernadette Bernson is a German author, editor and translator from English into German, with a particular fascination for British crime fiction, atmospheric landscapes and stories in which the past refuses to remain buried. Her psychological crime thriller THE WHITBY PROTOCOL combines a modern police investigation with questions of memory, identity and institutional power. The novel is set in Whitby, Goathland and across the North York Moors.

Book Details

Title: THE WHITBY PROTOCOL

Author: Bernadette Bernson

Genre: Psychological crime thriller

Publication date: 15 October 2026

Formats: Paperback and eBook

Website:  https://www.bernadette-bernson.com

Purchase: Amazon UK