by Adam McPhee

Ginny and Matt, the protagonists of Michelle Berry’s new novel Satellite Image, realize it’s time to quit the city after Ginny is robbed at knife point. They buy a house after a single showing in a small town a short drive away; the house needs some work, but it’s nice enough, and it faces a ravine. Anxious to move in, Ginny looks their new house up online and sees an image showing what seems to be a body in the yard. She calls to Matt, and he confirms her impression, but suddenly the image updates, and the body is gone. Sure of what they saw but unable to find it again, they move in.

In their new hometown of Parkville—a nondescript Canadian locale perhaps geared in its genericness toward a wider American readership—Ginny and Matt host a dinner party, and the neighbors tell them that the previous owners of the house were a bit odd. The elderly couple kept to themselves and had an absurd number of packages delivered to their doorstep. Then things start getting weird: Someone is invading their yard space, moving their Halloween decorations, and eventually entering the house. At one of Ginny’s dinner parties—now a regular occurrence—this uninvited guest sneaks into the kitchen and rearranges the chicken bones on a pile of dirty dishes to leave a threatening message.

Berry withholds the solution to all the intrigue until in the book’s very last pages, a choice that doesn’t allow the protagonists much chance to absorb or react. Yet, as it keeps suggesting questions and refusing answers, Satellite Image maintains a steady propulsion that enlivens its mundane subject matter and linear narrative structure—an effect many thriller writers aspire to achieve.

Beyond its traditional genre elements, Satellite Image offers particular insight into the often-unsettling process of settling into a new home. The questions Ginny and Matt ask themselves aren’t so atypical: Why did the previous owners take all the lightbulbs but leave behind so many canned goods? What’s up with that window that doesn’t lock properly, that low overhang on the roof, the discrepancies between old photos and the way the place looks now? For Berry’s characters, these questions have consequences that may cause the heart to race, but for her readers they’re an opportunity to reflect on the sorts of things everyone encounters when they move somewhere new: the eerie idiosyncrasies of everyday life.