Corum House

An eerie, unsettling, and gothic investigation into a Vermont orphanage, inspired by the real stories from Burlington’s St. Joseph’s Orphanage. Alex Kelley is a brilliant true-crime author, although her most recent book was a failure, somewhat coinciding with her husband’s death. Desperate for work and renewal, she’s hired to ghostwrite a history of the long-closed orphanage, and Alex immediately begins to dig hard and dig deep. In no time, she’s following a lead about Tommy, a nine-year-old boy who disappeared in 1968—or was it murder? As Alex pursues Tommy, even more stories from the orphanage float to the top as the body count starts to rise. Seybolt does an excellent job of moving between past and present, having the former orphans, now seniors, tell their stories. The ending is as powerful as it is shocking. A strong work of crime fiction.