It hinges on reality, slowly building to a terror that seems real and sometimes personal, as it does in THE INVITED.' - Minneapolis Star Tribune 'McMahon finds ingenuity in the likes of Shirley Jackson to craft a story.

McMahon again proves that the modern ghost story is more than things that go bump in the night. supplies a plethora of frights that emerge from believable characters trying to navigate normal lives. As the building project progresses, the house will become a place of menace and unfinished business: a new home, now haunted, that beckons its owners and their neighbors toward unimaginable danger. With her passion for artifacts, Helen finds special materials to incorporate into the house-a beam from an old schoolroom, bricks from a mill, a mantel from a farmhouse-objects that draw her deeper into the story of Hattie and her descendants, three generations of Breckenridge women, each of whom died suspiciously.

When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago. In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on forty-four acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. A chilling ghost story with a twist: the New York Times bestselling author of The Winter People returns to the woods of Vermont to tell the story of a husband and wife who don't simply move into a haunted house-they build one.

Jennifer mcmahon the invited