The Christmas Guest
Ashley Smith, an American art student in London for her junior year, was planning on spending Christmas alone, but a last-minute invitation from fellow student Emma Chapman brings her to Starvewood Hall, country residence of the Chapman family. The Cotswold manor house, festooned in pine boughs and crammed with guests for Christmas week, is a dream come true for Ashley. She is mesmerized by the cozy, firelit house, the large family, and the charming village of Clevemoor, but also by Adam Chapman, Emma’s aloof and handsome brother.
But Adam is being investigated by the local police over the recent brutal slaying of a girl from the village, and there is a mysterious stranger who haunts the woodland path between Starvewood Hall and the local pub. Ashley begins to wonder what kind of story she is actually inhabiting. Is she in a grand romance? A gothic tale? Or has she wandered into something far more sinister and terrifying than she’d ever imagined?
Over thirty years later the events of that horrific week are revisited, along with a diary from that time. What began in a small English village in 1989 reaches its ghostly conclusion in modern-day New York, many Christmas seasons later.
Peter Swanson
It’s not every day a crime writer dares to peel back the tidy edges of the mystery genre, but Peter Swanson has made a career of doing just that—inviting readers into stories where the comfort of predictability is always just one twist away from unraveling. Known for psychological thrillers that relish in the sinister potential of the everyday, Swanson doesn't just craft plots—he toys with expectation, layering deceit, obsession, and dread into tales that feel disarmingly plausible.
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