The Tenant Who Was Already Dead

The apartment was cheap because nobody wanted it, and Nora Vance had stopped being able to afford wanting things, so the two of them found each other. She moves into 4B of the Ashmore, an old brown brick building on a forgotten street, with her seven year old daughter Wren and everything they own in the back of a borrowed car. The super warns her about the wiring. Half the mailboxes in the lobby are empty.

Then the mail starts. Not hers, addressed to a previous tenant who left no name. The first envelope holds a single index card with three lines in a small careful hand. A date. A name. An apartment number, two floors up. Nora almost throws it away. She does not.

When the date arrives, so does the death, ruled perfectly natural. Then another card comes, a sooner date, a lower floor, and Nora lays them out and sees them stepping down the building toward her own. This is a tense, tender mystery thriller about a mother, a daughter, and a countdown she cannot explain. Who is sending the cards, can she stop them, and what happens when the last one bears a name she knows?