The Ghost Writer

Grace Logan is offered the ghostwriting job of a lifetime: help Claudia Blackwood, a once-notorious and now frail, reclusive novelist, finally set down her side of a decades-old triple murder she was accused of — and acquitted of — as a teenager. To take it, Grace must travel to Claudia's isolated island mansion, the Overlook, cut off by a rolling storm.

The unease starts almost immediately. Claudia's previous ghostwriter, Nora Moss, was found battered and floating in the sea below the house, and cryptic warnings soon suggest Grace is in danger of following her. As Grace works to draw out Claudia's version of events, the boundary between the story she's been hired to tell and the one actually unfolding around her starts to blur.

A short, fast novella in Loreth Anne White's "Never Tell" collection of gothic-tinged suspense stories, The Ghost Writer builds its atmosphere from the isolated setting and an unreliable narrator, and is best known for a final twist reviewers describe as a full surprise reveal rather than a foreshadowed one.