Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon

 

Boone's Ferry, Vermont, is a small mountain town.  Those who lived there had ancestors who'd been there for decades and outsiders were not encouraged.  Back in 1919, a plague had hit the town.  The superstitious townsfolk had blamed it all on the local town pariah, the knackerman who dealt with the town's dead animals. The town's doctor and his protege, Frankie, tried to do what they could but both perished along with many others.

Present day, Ashley and Malcolm who are siblings, have just inherited a house in Boone's Ferry when their grandmother died.  She had come from one of the old families there but insists she has never been there.  Their mother had disappeared two years before when she went to visit the town so the siblings decide to go see their house and discover what they can about their mother.  

But things don't go well.  No one is welcoming and even go out of their ways to discourage the two from staying at all.  Their every attempt to discover the truth is thwarted by the locals and soon the two are even suspicious that their lives could be in danger.  They find out that far from never being there, that their grandmother had grown up in Boone's Ferry and had lived in the house they inherited, that of the town doctor from the plague time.  Can they find out what's going on?

Jennifer McMahon is an American author who grew up in Vermont.  She writes in the psychological suspense genre and this book is another one of these.  It balances on the edge of supernatural terror and explainable events and the suspense slowly builds throughout the novel.  Ashley is determined to find out what is going on while Malcolm is an optimist who refuses to see the danger they are in.  I would have liked to find out exactly what the plague was but that was never explained.  I listened to this novel and the narrator did an excellent job.  This book is recommended for psychological thriller readers.