About This Book
A young woman who makes her living telling people exactly what they want to hear gets a client she can't quite read. Susan Burke is terrified — convinced that the crumbling Victorian mansion she shares with her family has a darkness to it, and that her stepson Miles is at the center of it. What begins as an easy con quickly becomes something harder to dismiss, and harder to escape. Flynn keeps the stakes intimate and psychological: this isn't a story about ghosts so much as about the uneasy space between manipulation and belief, and how quickly one bleeds into the other.
At 64 pages, Flynn wastes nothing. The prose is sharp and unsentimental, the narrator's voice bracingly cynical — until it isn't. The real pleasure is structural: Flynn constructs a story that seems to be going one direction, then quietly, brutally reconfigures itself in the final pages. It's a showcase for what she does better than almost anyone — building a con inside a story about a con, so that reader and character end up equally wrong-footed. Brief, but it lingers.
