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The Dollhouse: A Thriller
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 16 2025
Pages: 452
Weight: 1.32
Height: 1.01 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
An old model house. A living town. Every tiny change triggers real-world disaster.
When the dollhouse in the attic starts calling the shots, a small-town curator has to choose which lives can be saved.
Gemma Holt never believed in cursed objects. As the new curator of a coastal museum, she is supposed to catalog the past, not fight it. Then an elaborate scale model of a boardinghouse arrives from a condemned property on the bluff, built by the town's most notorious architect, Redwood. Rooms, stairwells, porches, even the street grid outside, every detail of the little world is perfect.
A week later, a ladder slips at a job site that matches a corner of the model. A pier gives way where a set of toy pilings had been nudged. A kitchen burns after someone moves a matchbox in the dining room. The pattern is undeniable. Whatever happens inside the model finds a way to happen outside.
Teaming up with Alicia, a fire investigator who does not believe in coincidence, and David, a maintenance tech with his own history in the house, Gemma starts to map the model against the town. The deeper they look, the clearer it becomes that Redwood did not just design buildings. He designed accidents. He built a hidden engine under the house and wired it into the people who lived above it.
Now that engine has started again.
To stop the run of disasters, Gemma will have to break the model's heart, expose the names of the dead it was built on, and risk turning the whole town into a test site. But Redwood's work did not end at the property line. Shipments went out for years. Other places took his designs. Someone, somewhere, wanted the pattern to spread.
If she pulls too hard on the wrong piece, the next accident might not be local. It might be global.
Perfect for readers who crave:
Slow-burn supernatural dread rooted in real-world detail
A smart, capable heroine who refuses to walk away
A haunted object that behaves like a machine, not a ghost
Small-town politics, museum back rooms, and quiet bureaucratic coverups
A climax that mixes ritual, engineering, and raw human courage
Inside this novel you will find:
A coastal town where the prettiest views hide the worst stories
A museum attic full of misfiled history that suddenly matters
An architect who used tragedy as a drafting tool
A mystery built from floor plans, fire reports, and the scars people carry
An ending that closes the immediate threat while hinting that the pattern is not done with the world yet
If you like your supernatural thrillers grounded in procedure, layered with emotional weight, and driven by characters who feel like real people trying to do their jobs under impossible pressure, this story belongs on your nightstand. Just keep the lights on.
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