The Housesitter's Ledger
A Novel

About this book:

Charlotte Vance doesn't clean houses—she preserves them. As an elite housesitter for the ultra-wealthy, she's paid five figures a month to inhabit empty mansions, monitor humidity levels to the decimal point, and vanish into the woodwork before the owners return. But Blackwood Hall isn't just another Gilded Age fortress in the Hudson Valley. It's a granite mausoleum with a ledger recording every repair since 1922—and a gap in the autumn of 1994 where someone wrote in shaking hand: *The lime was applied as instructed. We will not speak of the garden wall again. She did not leave by the road.*

When the Blackwoods flee to Zurich, leaving Charlotte alone with forty-four armed security zones, a walled-up cellar doorway, and a portrait of a brother who officially doesn't exist, the house begins to reveal its architecture of silence. The conservatory is condemned. The master suite is sealed. The estate manager warns her: containment, not exploration. But the ledger's final entry is fresh, the lime in the foundation trench is still powdery, and something heavy just creaked open on the mezzanine above her head.

*The Housesitter's Ledger* is a locked-room gothic for the modern age—where the ghost isn't supernatural, the danger is structural, and the only thing more dangerous than the secrets in the walls is the woman paid to keep them.