Staged
A Domestic Suspense Novel

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Maren Doyle makes houses look as if nobody has ever been unhappy in them. She strips away the family photographs, the handprints and the odd little habits, and replaces them with neutral pillows and a bowl of lemons, until a stranger can picture himself living there. It is quiet work, and she is very good at it.

Then an agent in a hurry hires her to stage a handsome house at the end of Tamarack Court. The owners, Dale and Priya Whitlock, have moved away suddenly. Dale is charming, apologetic and wounded, and he keeps arriving to collect one last thing. The neighbors are warm, helpful and a little too eager to know what Maren has found. There are three weeks until the open house.

Maren handles every object in the house, and that is how she begins to notice. A kitchen drawer lined with the wrong paper. A child's height marks painted over twice. A pantry shelf arranged in a pattern that makes no sense for cooking. A key taped where no one would think to look. Somebody left this house in order, and somebody wanted it read.

As the days run down toward the open house, Maren must decide what a stranger owes a family she has never met, who in a friendly cul-de-sac can be trusted, and what it costs to say out loud what you see.

Staged is a slow-burning, intimate tale of a house, a hidden trail and the neighbors who looked the other way. Tense without gore, warm at its core, with a clue trail that plays fair and an ending worth the wait.

A domestic suspense novel. Clean, with no graphic violence.