Ellen’s had many assignments before as a ghost writer, but none as strange as Elver House. She arrives amidst a storm, locals reluctant to speak of the house and its caretaker, Catherine Carey. The house itself is beautiful, in a sort of ramshackle way, fallen to disrepair over the years as its caretaker has grown older. As Ellen conducts her interviews of Miss Carey, her life, and the house, she gets more involved than she expects.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this one when I started reading it. It has a bit of a lot of things in it: part memoir (on behalf of Miss Carey), part mystery, and a dive into women’s roles in society. I figured out the plot line pretty early on, and spent the majority of the book waiting for Ellen to catch up to me. It is a slow burn, but wraps up pretty neatly by the end.

Recommended if you like: slow burn mysteries, ghost stories

A slow burn gothic setting in the style of M. Night Shyamalan. The setting is claustrophobic, forbidding, with an ever growing sense of wrongness. I mistakenly believed that the pace of this book was slow, only to realize that the plot was coiling around me the entire time.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for this ARC, this is one I will be thinking about for a while.