The Guest House

Description

There’s a particular kind of dread that has nothing to do with the dark. It’s the dread of the slightly too helpful explanation. The bolt that’s newer than the door it’s fitted in. The carton of milk with a sell-by date three weeks past a dead woman’s death. The Guest House operates entirely in this register—and it does so with an assurance that puts it firmly in the company of the best domestic suspense being published right now.

Meredith Voss is not a character designed to make you comfortable. She’s a laid-off actuary, recently divorced, unsentimental about her inheritance and unsentimental about most things. She arrives at her estranged aunt’s isolated coastal guesthouse expecting to photograph rooms, sort paperwork, and leave with a check. She is, in other words, exactly the wrong kind of person to ignore a discrepancy. And from her first evening in the house, the discrepancies begin