The testimonial from Joanna Canon on the front cover states “I couldn’t put it down” but I could – quite easily. This one is a just sufficiently unsettling for you to keep being bothered reading, but it’s thoroughly hampered by the two main female characters. Both drift so passively through their lives that they may as well be in a coma. Both accept relationships that are less than ideal because they can’t be bothered getting out of them, and allow the men in their lives to make all the important decisions. Elenor has a very bad feeling about a house the first time she enters it but says nothing as her husband Richard goes ahead and purchases it, then blithely dismisses the weird things that keep happening once they move in. Richard is a deeply unattractive character whose habit of snooping around their lodger’s space is just as creepy as the haunting. The lodger, Zoe, suffers from extreme sleep deprivation in the house due to nightmares and sleepwalking but she is so absorbed in a complicated relationship with a man who already has a girlfriend that it never seems to occur to her to move out. And although both women are deeply unsettled by their respective experiences in the house, they don’t talk to one another about it until almost the end. What is wrong with these people??? Apart from being haunted, they are just deeply irritating. A decent ghost story spoiled by the living.