Saltwater Mansions

David Whitehouse's hairdresser was the one who told him about Saltwater Mansions. Something had happened there. Something strange, to the woman who lived on the ground floor. A woman named Caroline Lane.

Her neighbours all said the same thing. They were obsessed with Caroline Lane. Even though she had always paid her mortgage, her utility bills and her TV license, nobody had heard from her for 13 years. And yet, in all that time, nobody came looking for her.

After private detectives failed to find Caroline, a judge allowed the neighbours to enter her flat. What they found only deepened the mystery. Food in the fridge. Vests on the clothes horse. It was as though she'd simply vanished into thin air. Was she dead? Was she taken? Was Caroline Lane who she said she was at all? They all had theories.

But what if Caroline's wasn't the only story in Saltwater Mansions? What if there was one behind every single door? What if this wasn't a book about a missing woman at all, but a book about the hidden, tragic, profound, strange, difficult and miraculous inner lives of the ordinary people bound together by their obsession with her disappearance. A book about our shared fascination with solving real life-mystery.

SALTWATER MANSIONS is a truly unique, deeply moving and boundary-pushing work of creative non-fiction. It is 'true crime' and memoir combined, unfolding on two intertwining fronts as the search for one woman gives way to the extraordinary lives bound together by her disappearance.