666 Gable Way

Lamia (Scavenger Hunt) and Crook’s chilly, claustrophobic supernatural thriller puts a contemporary spin on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Aspiring fiction writer Phoebe Pyncheon, after getting fired from her job at a suburban Detroit newspaper, decides to moves in temporarily with her great-aunt Hester, her only living relative. Hester works as a psychic from her home, the House of the Seven Gables, a creepy, decrepit house in White Lake, Mich., which Phoebe last visited 15 years earlier. Hester also rents rooms to borders, including Alec Holgrave, an archaeologist visiting from England. As Phoebe reacquaints herself with the house, she senses a strange, unsettling presence more menacing than the spirits she remembered dwelling there as a girl with psychic abilities she now represses. The murder of the local council president, who wanted to appropriate Hester’s property, leads Phoebe and Holgrave to dig into her great-aunt’s business ties within the community and other mysteries. What they find isn’t pleasant. This page-turner will keep readers up late at night. Hawthorne fans should be pleased. (Oct.)