The Disinvited Guest

February 1, 2022

Still combatting health issues from the 2020 pandemic when the next pandemic rolls around, Lucy Harper hastens to seek shelter with husband Reed on his family's private island off the Maine coast. Alas, there's something spooky in the air. Is the island haunted--typhus patients once quarantined here--or is a current resident wreaking havoc? From two-time Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning Goodman; with a 75,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing.

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May 1, 2022
"Go back where you came from!" Lucy Harper's party of six receives this warning en route to her husband's family's retreat on an island in Maine. It's been 10 years since the 2020 pandemic, and a new, even-deadlier virus is forcing people into isolation. Lucy has health issues, including PTSD from her battle for life the first time around, and the eerie setting makes her feel "that the death I'd avoided 10 years ago has been waiting here for me all along." The island was ostensibly cursed by a colonial witch who was buried alive there, and in the mid-nineteenth century, it provided plague quarantine for Irish immigrants. One of the nursing sisters is said to appear as the Grey Lady. An old journal that Lucy discovers tells of satanic rituals and an antlered man, a "stag on two legs." The journal entries are heart-rending and mingle perfectly with Lucy's first-person narrative. Real-life issues begin to drive the party apart. Apparently, there was a great deal that Lucy wasn't told about what happened on the island in 2020. Goodman, a master genre-blender, has integrated elements of Mary Roberts Rinehart's "had-I-but-known" gambit and Agatha Christie's "alone-on-an-island" theme to come up with a real winner. "The island ties a knot in your heart that binds you to it."

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May 23, 2022
Years after the 2020 pandemic, and ahead of a raging second, even deadlier plague, writer Lucy Harper, the narrator of this unsettling gothic thriller from bestseller Goodman (The Stranger Behind You), and her husband, Reed, escape to Maine’s Fever Island, which Reed and his sister, Liz, have inherited. During the 1850s, the island served as a quarantine site for Irish famine ships overflowing with dying typhus-infected migrants. Despite the dire circumstances, the first days on the island feel almost festive as the couple and their various guests, including Liz, are well supplied with food and drink. But the island begins to cast its spooky spell on everyone, particularly once Lucy, who has been unsuccessfully seeking a subject for her next book, immerses herself in the wrenching journal kept during the typhus onslaught by Reed’s physician ancestor. Things swiftly fall apart as possessions start to disappear, and escalating incidents of sabotage threaten the group’s survival. Never mind Goodman’s stumbles sustaining convincing characters, especially through the fantastic final twists. This smooth cocktail of refreshingly chilly suspense is sure to win her new fans. Agent: Robin Rue, Writers House.