Ghostface Obsession

The worst night of Luck Montgomery's life ends the way nightmares end: her drunk father's hands around her throat, a pair of scissors within reach, and a body that has to go somewhere before morning. She chooses the river. She is pushing him under the black water when she looks up and sees a figure on the far bank, a black robe and a white ghost mask, dragging a burden of his own to the edge.

Roseville has a serial killer. The calls come first, then the watching, then the window, and nobody has ever come close to catching him. Now he has seen everything Luck did, and instead of screaming, instead of running, she goes home and waits for him to come collect her secret.

He comes. He ties her to a chair in her own kitchen and takes care of the body she left behind, and by sunrise they have scrubbed a crime scene together like old friends. Luck jokes that he needs a name. Ghostface. A week later the town paper gives its killer the same name, as if the two of them are already writing one story. And when a white mask appears on her porch like a gift, Luck finally understands it was never a warning. It was an invitation.

She says yes. Saying yes means phone calls to dying men and a partner who knows her schedule better than she does, a killer who fixes her porch light, steals her chocolate milk, and signs his notes with a crooked heart. Saying yes also means paperwork, because the hardest person to make disappear is a man who has to keep living on file: a forged goodbye note, a fake job out east, a pay stub aged in an oven, a detective named Reyes who keeps coming through Luck's checkout line with quiet, careful questions.

Reyes has spent twenty years chasing the pattern that killed her own sister, and she does not need proof. She needs a name. Meanwhile a reporter is assembling a file with Luck's street on it, and a teenager in a party-store mask starts copying the pattern the papers printed, calling girls in a voice that gets everything wrong. To survive the copycat, Luck and her ghost set one house rule: nobody dies unless they are standing in our kitchen. Then they learn what enforcing that rule costs.

Because the man under the mask has a past of his own, buried three hundred miles west in a town called Cedar Hollow, in a sheriff's bottom drawer, and the detective has just asked to see the file. She has a deadline, a deal, and one question she saves for last, asked on Luck's own porch with the rain coming down: Do you want saving?

"I'm not lost," Luck tells her. "I'm found."

A dark suspense of obsession, complicity, and the quiet a certain kind of person only finds at the center of the storm, Ghostface Obsession is the story of a girl who was never taken, and of a porch light that means, in the only language that matters: I'm home.