A short one, told mostly as a diary, and it’s pulpy. Ashley, an American student in London in the nineties, is invited home to a friend’s family estate in the country for Christmas — an old house, a brother she’s already half in love with, a village with an unsolved murder in its recent past. She writes it all down as it happens. Then the frame shifts to the present, somebody else is reading the diary, and everything you’ve been told gets reweighted. Swanson does this kind of turn better than almost anybody and it takes about ninety minutes to read.
The Christmas Guest