The Christmas Guest

An American art student studying in London receives an invitation to spend the holidays at her family's Cotswold manor property, Starvewood Hall, with a classmate. But beneath the boughs of fir and holly, mysteries are about to come to light, exposing the somber past of this ostensibly picturesque English community.

Ashley Smith, a junior American art student studying in London, had intended to spend Christmas alone until a last-minute offer from fellow student Emma Chapman sends her to the Chapman family's country home, Starvewood Hall. Ashley's fantasy comes true when she sees the Cotswold manor house decorated with pine boughs and packed with visitors during Christmas week. In addition to the enormous family, the quaint village of Clevemoor, and the warm, firelit house, Emma is enthralled with Adam Chapman, her hunky and attractive brother.

However, Adam is under police investigation in connection with the recent horrible murder of a village girl, and there's a shadowy outsider who stalks the wooded trail that runs between Starvewood Hall and the neighborhood bar. Ashley starts to question the kind of story she is genuinely living in. Does she have a gorgeous partner? A Gothic story? Or has she stumbled into something much darker and more horrifying than she could have ever imagined?

The events of that terrible week are reviewed more than thirty years later, coupled with a diary from that period. After several Christmas seasons, what started in a little English village in 1989 comes to a spooky end in contemporary New York.