The Winter Guest: A Psychological Suspense Novel

By Stephen Tait

A woman inheriting secrets. A stranger with no footprints. A town that has been lying for thirty-eight years.

When investigative journalist Emma Carter inherits her estranged grandmother's remote lakeside house in the snowbound town of Black Hollow, she sees it as a last chance to escape a career-ending scandal and start over.
On her first night, during the worst blizzard of the year, a man appears at her door.
Cold. Injured. Silent.
He says his car went off the mountain road. The sheriff says no vehicles were reported missing. The locals seem afraid of him.
And when Emma finds a hidden photograph in her grandmother's attic - the same man, standing beside her grandmother, dated 1987 - she realizes he hasn't aged a single day.

Black Hollow has a legend: every twenty years, during the worst winter storm, a stranger appears at a different house. Within days, someone in town disappears. Always someone connected to a decades-old secret the townspeople call The Winter Guest.
Most people dismiss it as folklore.
Until another resident vanishes.
And Emma begins to understand that the real killer isn't the stranger at her door - it's the respected sheriff who has been burying the truth, and the bodies, for nearly four decades.
Her grandmother left evidence that names him.
And now Emma is next.

The Winter Guest is a propulsive, atmospheric psychological thriller set against the brutal beauty of an Ontario winter - a story about the secrets small communities keep, the price of silence, and the question of how long grief can drive a person before it becomes something else entirely.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GZ94GY8M
• ISBN13: 9798195135805
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 70 Pages
• Weight: 0.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"