A searing, chilling debut suspense novel about a family home with a history, haunting three generations of women—for fans of Jean Hanff Korelitz and Gillian Flynn.

For as long as Betty can remember, Hanger Hill has been more than a house: it’s a place haunted by whispers. Some of the rumors are vague. Others are disturbingly specific. She remembers only some of it… the flick of a cat’s tale. The smell of rot. Screams coming from below the kitchen floor. Pages of old diaries curling amongst flames.

On Betty’s eighteenth birthday, she finds the courage to ask her strange, reclusive mother to tell the real story of her family: her mother had been a young woman, reeling from the suicide of her grandmother, when she inherited her family home in the town where her troubled sister drowned. Moving from the city with her long-term boyfriend, she began renovating the house in which she spent so much of her childhood. At first, she was convinced that the project would lift her out of her debilitating grief, but instead she found herself isolated, soon overcome by creeping solitude as her relationship broke down and tensions within the house rose.

As her mother spins her story, Betty evades questions from the police officer who is circling, convinced that the case of the deaths at Hanger Hill should be reopened. Then, she discovers her great-grandmother’s diaries, and the passages inside reveal a terrible truth at the heart of her family.