THE HOUSE BEYOND THE DUNES by Mary Burton will be released on September 5, 2023 by Montlake.
After surviving a fall that took the life of her boyfriend, Lane McCord returns to Kyle’s beach house to collect her things. A winter storm keeps her trapped at the house and her only neighbors are childhood friends of Kyle’s. With nothing else to do, Lane searches the beach house for clues about the man she was dating for only a few days before his fatal accident. The deeper Lane digs, the more she discovers about Kyle’s possible criminal past. She is aided by a local detective and from a mystery person who keeps sending her passages from a journal belonging to a woman named Stevie. Stevie was also investigating Kyle, and she provides Lane with some of the answers she is seeking.
THE HOUSE BY THE DUNES is a thriller with a slow build. The reader meets Lane in the hospital just after the accident. With Lane’s foggy memory, the reader is constantly left asking whether Lane was responsible for Kyle’s fatal fall. There are a lot of twists, turns, and red herrings throughout the novel to keep the reader guessing as to previous events. The big twist at the end—and Stevie’s real identity—fell flat for me. After that, the rest of the novel dwindled to a less-than-satisfactory ending.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.