The Ghost Writer

Grace Logan is offered the best ghostwriting job of her career. Claudia Blackwood, a reclusive and frail novelist, wants to tell her own account of a triple murder from decades ago. She was accused of it as a teenager and acquitted.

The work means travelling to the Overlook, Claudia's mansion on an isolated island. A storm rolls in and cuts the house off from the mainland, so Grace has no easy way out once she arrives.

Unease sets in almost at once. Nora Moss, who wrote for Claudia before Grace, was pulled from the water beneath the house, battered and dead in the waves. Cryptic warnings begin to arrive, and they suggest Grace could meet the same end.

As Grace coaxes Claudia's version of events out of her, the line between the story she is paid to write and the one happening around her begins to blur. The narrator cannot be fully trusted.

The novella is short and fast, part of the "Never Tell" collection of gothic-tinged suspense stories. Its atmosphere comes from the storm, the island and the house. The ending arrives as a complete surprise, with no hints laid beforehand, and the question is whether Grace can finish Claudia's book and leave the Overlook alive.