The House Hunt by C.M. Ewan

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 27, 2024

Lucy is claustrophobic. She also lives with a constant fear of being attacked. Her husband, Sam, is a psychology professor who runs support groups to meet his university’s community involvement guideline. Sam hasn’t managed to cure Lucy of her phobias, although one of his support groups is devoted to people with debilitating fears.

Sam inherited a house that he and Lucy can’t afford. They went into debt to fix it up before putting it on the market. A potential buyer named Donovan arrives to look at the house, but the estate agent is running late. Sam is working and Donovan has another appointment later so Lucy sets aside her fear and agrees to show him the house. Since this is a thriller, you know that Lucy made a brave but bad decision.

Intercut with scenes that set up events inside the house are scenes of Sam running his support group. A couple of its members seem unbalanced, particularly one who fears that he won’t be able to control his homicidal impulses. Will Sam be harmed?

The separate Lucy and Sam storylines eventually intersect, leading to multiple nongraphic scenes of violence. Characters find themselves under attack for reasons that most of them can’t comprehend. The reader is challenged to decide which characters are innocent and which are villainous. The reader will suspect nearly every character of living a hidden life.

Speed, intensity, and cinematic action are the novel’s strengths. C.M. Ewan accomplishes this by using the traditional tricks of the thriller writer’s trade:  short chapters (116 of them) populated by short (often single-sentence) paragraphs. He invites the reader to experience the novel as a movie by making frequent cuts between the main action and distant action. Ewan needn’t have used techniques that create the illusion of a page-turner; he speeds the story along by keeping it in motion at all times. He judiciously mixes in distractions — unexplained thumps, a character’s failure to respond after venturing into the basement — to ratchet up the suspense. His use of the genre’s writing techniques is masterful, even if they make the book seem a bit formulaic.

When it seems that the plot has been resolved, Ewan wheels in a new ending. He does this multiple times before the story finally runs out of gas. It’s fun to be surprised but when surprise follows surprise follows surprise, I feel like I’m being played. Given that the plot as a whole is unrealistic, I don’t suppose an unrealistic series of surprises at the end can do any harm.

It’s difficult to say whether Lucy is a likable character. She’s so frenzied that the reader gets little chance to know her. Lucy is the kind of protagonist who places herself in a dangerous position rather than waiting for the police to arrive, as if she knows that the story will be better if she does one more brave deed. Characters making stupid decisions is the foundation for every slasher movie, but I always hope that thriller writers will invest their characters with a bit of common sense.

My most significant complaint about The House Hunt does not relate to how the story is told, but whether the story makes sense. To avoid spoiling it, I won’t discuss why characters behave as they do. I will say that the topics of altered or lost memories and brainwashing make their way into the plot. As is often true in thrillers, Ewan’s vague explanations of how those concepts drive a character are unconvincing.

The obligatory upbeat ending will please many readers. Setting aside a plot that a less charitable reviewer might describe as preposterous, The House Hunt merits a firm recommendation for accomplishing the ultimate goal of thrillers: creating suspense, a puzzling mystery, and exciting moments. I set aside my concerns about the plot for the sake of enjoying a book that, despite its flaws, tells an engaging story.

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