The housekeeper - Melanie Wallace

When Jamie Hall finds a boy tied to a tree and cuts him loose, she can have no idea of the desperate chain of events her act of humanity will trigger.

An orphaned teenage runaway who has fetched up with only her dog and her backpack in the lonesome town of her grandparents' birth, Jamie becomes housekeeper to Margaret, a retired photographer. There she meets Galen, a trapper who has done a stretch inside and who now lives at a remove from life. Slowly, they come to realise that each has something the other craves. But when the feral boy Jamie releases, mute and crazed from all he has endured, sets out on a lethal spree, he is stalked by Harlan, a dangerously unhinged poacher who was once a childhood friend of Galen. As Harlan persuades himself that Jamie is sheltering the boy, these various stories of loss, redemption and pursuit become shackled together, and Jamie's hard-won chance of security is plunged into peril.

Tense, passionate and unflinching,The Housekeeperis a novel of immense tenderness and relentless momentum.