The First Chair

By Deon Benito

Ada Byrne keeps other people's houses - and notices everything. Hired for the winter season at Boyne Mountain, she takes charge of twenty slope-side rental houses: twenty keys, twenty families' winters, turnover Saturdays, and a mountain that keeps its own counsel.

When a man is found dead on the mountain, the death looks like winter doing what winter does. Ada's keeper's eye disagrees. Behind the houses she tends runs an older paper trail: a timber deed from 1919 that was never filed, a title claim built on a century of quiet, and another death, in 1978, that the mountain never explained.

Ada does what keepers do. She walks the houses, she reads what they keep, and she carries what she finds to the right hands.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HNY2F61W
• ISBN13: 9798953798044
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Benito Books
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"