The Eighteenth Room

Seventeen rooms. Nell counted them herself.

So who is living in the eighteenth?

When forensic photographer Nell Haddon and her husband Owen buy Hollins House, a tall Edwardian villa in a quiet English market town, it is meant to be a fresh start. A year of failed fertility treatment is behind them. The house is bigger than they can afford and older than it looks. So Nell does what she always does. She numbers every room with a strip of tape and photographs it, so she can prove later exactly what was there.

Seventeen rooms.

But there is a draught in the linen press that comes from nowhere. A chimney with four pots and only three fireplaces. A narrow louvred window halfway up the back wall, between two floors, that belongs to no room at all. And every night, at exactly twenty to ten, someone climbs a staircase that isn't on any plan.

The last woman who lived here vanished one January night and was never seen again. The elderly doctor next door is very kind, very polite, and very keen that nobody goes knocking on walls. And Owen is hiding something about why they really came to this house.

Nell is hiding something too.

Because behind the wall, someone has been waiting since 1987. Someone who tears a page off the calendar every night so that tomorrow will come faster. Someone whose secret is about to become Nell's own.

And tomorrow is almost here.

The Eighteenth Room is a gripping, twisting psychological thriller about the secrets families bury, the lies a marriage can survive, and how far a father will go to make sure his daughter never learns the truth. Dark, suspenseful and heartbreaking, with an ending you will not see coming.