The Ghost Ledger

Eleanor Vance has spent her career settling the estates of the recently departed, but nothing in her years at the Thornhaven solicitor's office prepares her for the letter that names her sole heir to Hollow House. The crumbling manor on the storm-lashed cliffs has belonged to Great-Aunt Augusta Vance for decades, and Eleanor has not set foot inside since childhood. When she arrives to catalogue its contents, she discovers not only a sealed room but a spectral ledger bound in pale leather, a book that tallies debts owed to the dead, and entries that are still being added. A grey specter haunts the east wing. The locals warn her about the Between-Man, the collector who comes when a debt falls due. Her partner Maxwell Cray arrives with questions of his own, while old family friend Nora Blackwood guards secrets she has carried since Augusta was alive. As Eleanor deciphers the ledger's cryptic entries, the names on its pages begin to match people still living in Thornhaven: Rosalind Marsh, her sister, Rosalind's niece, and figures from Augusta's past who should never have crossed paths. Among them is Edmund Bray, a man Augusta once trusted, and the charismatic Silas Thorne, whose interest in the house seems far from academic. When the specter begins to appear to Eleanor directly, she realizes the ledger is not merely recording a haunting, it is summoning one. She must choose whether to burn the book and destroy the only key to her great-aunt's secrets, or read the final entry and let the Between-Man collect what Augusta owed, even if the price is Eleanor herself.