The Christmas Guest

Ashley Smith, an American art student spending her junior year in London, expects to be alone at Christmas. Then a classmate, Emma Chapman, invites her to Starvewood Hall, the Chapman family's manor house in the Cotswolds. The house is hung with pine boughs and full of relatives and guests for the whole of Christmas week.

Ashley is taken with the firelit rooms, the big family and the nearby village of Clevemoor. She is also drawn to Emma's brother Adam, who is aloof and handsome. But the local police are investigating Adam over the recent brutal killing of a girl from the village, and a stranger keeps appearing on the woodland path between the Hall and the pub.

As the week goes on, Ashley starts to wonder which kind of story she has stepped into: a romance, a gothic tale, or something far more frightening. Secrets in the household begin to come out, and with them the village's grim past.

This is a novella, so it moves quickly. The main events take place in 1989, and more than thirty years later the week is revisited through a diary from that time. The story reaches its ghostly conclusion in present-day New York. It is a wintry mystery with a cozy setting and a dark undercurrent.