Wylie Lark is a true crime writer holed up in a rented Iowa farmhouse over Christmas, working on the 1980s murders that happened in that house — two parents shot, a girl missing, a boy who survived. A blizzard comes in, the power goes, and she finds a small child unconscious in the snow in the yard. Gudenkauf runs three timelines: The night of the killings, a woman and a boy held in a locked room somewhere, and Wylie in the storm. They come together in the way you hope they won’t. The weather does half the work — a whiteout on flat ground with no neighbors.
The Overnight Guest