When Kese, just out of college, starts his summer job in a small New England town, he finds himself trying to unravel a mystery. Charlotte West, rich and imperious, has been baffling the locals since she arrived in the town more than twenty years ago. Does she have a dark past—or is she just an excuse for Kese to indulge an obsession, or to avoid the encroaching boredom of his days? His investigation takes him back through the history of the town and of America itself, with its borders of class and race and bloodline. A work of literary fiction with an American mystery at its center, The West House is about the traumatic pasts that haunt the book's characters, and about the stories that it is possible for us to tell about those pasts, those hauntings.