At the end of a road that stops being a road, an old hotel keeps its guests a little too well.

When Arthur Bell is found dead in the library, the door locked from the inside and the key still in the room, investigator Elena Voss is called in to make sense of a night nobody wants to describe the same way twice. Every guest is hiding something. Every story has a gap.

And every night at two in the morning, something walks the east corridor, three unhurried steps, and stops exactly where the hallway shouldn't end at all.

Elena has one rule left from the worst case of her career: never decide who did it until you understand why everyone is lying. At the Alder House, she will need it more than she ever has before, because the truth here is older than the murder, and it has been waiting far longer than anyone imagines.