HOA President

Craig Dunmore has been HOA president at Whisper Creek Estates for twenty-two years. Everyone loves him. He remembers whose kid made varsity, drives your dog home in a storm, waives your fine with a smile. When Claire and Ryan Ashworth move in, he's the first neighbor at their door - helpful, warm, three doors down with the yellow mailbox you can't miss.
He has also been quietly obsessed with Claire since the day she arrived.
What follows isn't loud. It's a formal notice about eleven minutes of barking, signed in his own careful hand. It's firewood on a cold morning, and a twenty-minute walk that becomes a habit before Claire notices it happening. It's a husband whose business trips leave just enough silence for somebody patient to fill. And when the isolation campaign finally turns lethal, it's delivered with so much genuine-seeming grief that grieving beside him feels, for a long time, like the only thing left to do.
Ryan sees it first - a handshake a half-second too firm, a pattern that only ever touches their house - and spends a year being quietly gaslit into believing he's the one coming apart. By the time Claire catches up to what she's been living beside, the two of them have to prove something no one on their street wants to believe about a man who has spent twenty-two years making himself impossible to doubt.
HOA PRESIDENT is a slow-burn domestic thriller about the particular danger of a threat with a spotless reputation - and about how long it takes two people to trust each other again once something patient has spent a year working in the gaps between them.