When Nate asks her–earnestly, without a shred of irony or judgment–what would make her happy, she ponders the question carefully and decides that she wants to return to her roots. When Helen’s father dies, though, she reexamines her life and discovers a simple truth: she is not happy. The young, married couple have sensible teaching jobs at a cushy private school in Connecticut, share a nice apartment, and enjoy the company of other stable, sensible friends. Helen and Nate have had a safe, cookie-cutter kind of life. As Helen starts carefully sourcing decorative building materials for her home–wooden beams, mantles, historic bricks–she starts to unearth, and literally conjure, the tragic lives of Hattie’s descendants, three generations of “Breckenridge women,” each of whom died amidst suspicion, and who seem to still be seeking something precious and elusive in the present day. When they discover that this charming property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago.

In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate abandon the comforts of suburbia and their teaching jobs 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. 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 start building one from scratch, without knowing it, until it’s too late.

Jennifer mcmahon the invited