First published 2025
Margo Miyake has lost eleven bidding wars in eighteen months of house hunting in Washington DC's brutal market. The 37-year-old publicist shares a tiny apartment with her husband Ian, watching their marriage and baby plans crumble along with each failed offer. Then she learns about the perfect house coming to market in exactly one month. Margo decides to buy it before the listing goes public and the cash buyers swarm in. She starts with light stalking of the current owners. Then comes the trespassing. Her methods grow more extreme as she works to infiltrate their lives and secure the sale. Each boundary she crosses brings her closer to the house that represents everything missing from her life. Just when Margo thinks she has won over the sellers, her carefully laid plans hit an obstacle. But she refuses to give up on the dream that has consumed her completely.
Genres: domestic-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, darkly-comedic, morally-ambiguous, obsessive, tense
Tropes: escalating-stakes, obsessive-protagonist, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Washington DC
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
288 pages · Paperback · Celadon Books
Content warnings: mental-illness