About this book:

In "The House That Lied," Mara Flynn awakens to find her husband, Evan, missing, leaving behind a pristine smart home equipped with the latest Helios technology—a system designed for ultimate security but now riddled with inconsistencies. As police suspicions mount against her due to a convenient memory lapse, a mysterious smudge of blood, and a strategically open back door, Mara struggles to recall the events of the previous night. She discovers the house’s internal cameras were in an inexplicable "Privacy Mode" during the critical hours of Evan’s disappearance, a digital blackout that seems to both hide and accuse her. Driven by a desperate need for answers, Mara begins to unravel the carefully constructed digital facade of her smart home, revealing layers of deceit that go far beyond a simple disappearance.

As Mara digs deeper, aided by an anonymous digital whistleblower and a skeptical cybersecurity friend, she uncovers Evan’s hidden life: mounting debts, a secret and illicit Helios "beta program" collecting intimate user data from unsuspecting neighbors, and a shocking betrayal by her best friend, Lucy, who was complicit in the scheme. The house itself, designed by Evan, is revealed to be a tool of psychological manipulation, programmed with a "Gaslight Protocol" to systematically erase and rewrite logs, making Mara doubt her own sanity. The thrilling climax sees Mara physically cut the power to the house, plunging it into chaos, as she traps Caleb, Evan’s technical accomplice and the architect of the gaslighting, and Evan himself, who shockingly reappears, still attempting to shift blame. Ultimately, the raw, unedited data siphoned from the house’s core, combined with confessions from both men, exposes a vast corporate conspiracy, finally setting Mara free from the house that lied.