"The hoarder" by Jess Kidd

An audio book.

Maud Drennan (late 30s) has been working at the house of Mr Cathal Flood (who folds "his long legs like picnic chairs") for a week. He tells her stories (sister and wasp attack, etc) that sound as if they should end with a moral. When the tide's out "the starfish forgot there was an ocean and stiffened with dismay". He had a wife Mary and has a son Gabriel, a lecturer.

Maud has a friend Renate (born male) who thinks Maud has psychic powers. They think Flood killed his wife (rather than falling down the stairs) and that Gabriel had a sister (there are photos with faces burnt out). Maud hears/sees saints giving her advice (Raphael is too dazzling to look at - "I'll adjust the brightness", he says). Flood's last care-worker, Sam, might have been attacked by Flood and might have had a mental breakdown. Maud fancies him.

Flood's over 2m high, a presence "undeniable as a slagheap or a piano". He has a pet fox Larkin. He dislikes Gabriel, who wants to search the house for something.

Maud learns from a priest that Flood's daughter Margerite died when 7 - an accidental drowning while on holiday? Mary kept cuttings about a schoolgirl, Maggie Dunne, who went missing in Dorset (not so far from Corfe Castle) when she was 15. Renate's place is looted, people looking for some evidence that Maud had taken from Flood's house. Maud and Sam sleep together - "to a point here and now and no other, never. Then parachuting into sleep, me folded silk strapped to his back".

More backstory is filled in. When 18, Mary had been married to Cathal's widowered father. He soon died, leaving her his money, so Cathal married her. Margerite tried to kill Gabriel. She had to be put in a home, in Dorset.

Gabriel is suddenly planning to move his father into a home. He's complained about Maud who's no longer allowed into the house.

Maud goes to a spiritualist meeting. She's told that Sam isn't who he seems to be. She goes to the Dorset care-home. A wing there was funded by Margaret. Sam drives her there. Gabriel is tailing her. She steals his car. He has gear in the boot to murder her. Sam (actually Stephen) is his sidekick. When Margerite (aka Maggie Dunne) absconded, she returned to the family house and was so violent that she was killed in self-defence and thrown down the well in the back garden.

Cathal falls down the stairs. When he's dying in hospital, Maud visits him. Gabriel didn't want the house to be sold (her mother's final - missing - will gave the house to him). The house is burnt down.

Other reviews

• Andrew Michael Hurley (Having the main character “seeing the dead” is a conceit that Kidd has carried over from her first novel, and while in Himself the ghosts of the departed were absolutely necessary [...], in The Hoarder it feels superfluous as a storytelling device. ... characterisation is where Kidd excels. ... The descriptive skill and wordplay also extend to place)
• universeinwords (beautifully walks the line between a contemporary mystery and a Magical Realism-adjacent fiction book. ... One thing that did leave me a little disappointed was that I figured out the "mystery" part of the novel relatively quickly, about a hundred pages before the main character did)