The Family Plot

Dahlia Lighthouse is twenty-six and still living in the shadow of her childhood. She grew up in a secluded mansion on an island, deep in the woods, with parents so devoted to true crime that they kept their children cut off from the world. When she was sixteen, her twin brother, Andy, disappeared, and she has never been able to move past it.

After several years away, Dahlia returns to the house following her father's death. The family gathers to bury him, and the grave turns out to be occupied already. The body is Andy's, his skull split open with an ax.

Dahlia is quick to blame the serial killer who terrorized the island for decades. Her relatives respond in stranger ways. Her brother, Charlie, throws himself into building a memorial museum that displays the family's research into famous murder victims. Her sister, Tate, carries on with her popular dioramas of crime scenes. Their mother turns cheerfully domestic, hardly recognizable as the woman who once staged murder reenactments for her children.

This is a family mystery with a gothic, claustrophobic setting and a dark, macabre tone. As Dahlia faces her grief and horror, she comes to suspect that her eccentric family, and the mansion itself, hold the answers about what happened to her twin.