The Warlock

The house knows what you will do before you do.

Jules Vance came to Harlow Point to catalogue forty boxes of a famous mans private papers. The salary is obscene. The gate has no handle on the outside. And the man who hired her, Gideon Thorne, the celebrity mind reader the newspapers call the Warlock, knows exactly how long she stood at the top of his stairs this morning. To the second.

He knows how she takes her tea. He knows about the fire in Dayton. He knows what she is going to say before she says it.

Then his trembling, fragile wife pulls her behind the orchids and whispers a warning: Get out before he makes you disappear.

Then Jules finds the key taped under a shelf in the cellar.

Inside the locked drawer are six files. Six women who came to this house on the frozen edge of Lake Superior to put Gideon Thornes papers in order. Six women who left no trace anywhere after they went. And a seventh folder, thicker than the rest, with Juless own face clipped to the front, and a typed list, still warm from the printer, predicting everything she will do, day by day.

Day 4: Subject will open Box 12.
Day 5: Subject will say nothing.

She says nothing.

The clocks lie. The lights change color while she sleeps. Her door swings open by itself at 3:40 in the morning, and a barefoot woman drifts down the hall asking if its morning yet. A steel rail gives way above a hundred-foot drop to the ice. And as the worst storm in fifty years bears down on the Keweenaw, Jules is offered one way out: a hidden stair, a truck waiting in the dark, and eleven seconds when every lock in the house lets go.

All she has to do is trust the right person.

But this is a house built to predict exactly what a good person will do. Every door is logged. Every word is recorded. Every choice has already been written down. The only question left is whether Jules Vance has one move nobody saw coming.

THE WARLOCK is a gothic puzzle-box thriller for fans of Rebecca, The Silent Patient, and Gone Girl: a slow-tightening nightmare of mind games, missing women, and a family secret sealed in the walls, with a double twist that rewrites everything you thought you read and a last line that will stay with you long after you close the book.

Everyone in this house is lying.

Everyone in this house is being watched.

And the one person who sees it all coming has never been more wrong.

Read it in one sitting. Then read it again.