A chilling ghost story with a twist: the New York
Times bestselling author of The Winter People
returns to the woods of Vermont to tell the story of a
husband and wife who don’t simply move into a haunted
house—they build one…
In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned
the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on forty-four
acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate,
aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of
their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful
property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former
history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of
Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a
century ago. With her passion for artifacts, Helen finds
special materials to incorporate into the house—a beam from
an old schoolroom, bricks from a mill, a mantel from a
farmhouse—objects that draw her deeper into the story of
Hattie and her descendants, three generations of
Breckenridge women, each of whom died suspiciously. As the
building project progresses, the house will become a place
of menace and unfinished business: a new home, now haunted,
that beckons its owners and their neighbors toward
unimaginable danger.