Belcorte, Pennsylvania tastes like death.

When journalist Jillian Duport inherits her late grandparents’ sprawling Second Empire Victorian in a crumbling Pocono mining town, she expects a fixer-upper to renovate and sell.

But her grandfather’s story is a tale of madness. Once a respected academic, he kidnapped a teenage girl, mutilated her, and took his own life. Decades later, his dark legacy still hovers over Belcorte's steep streets and gothic buildings. And the apparitions of grandfather and his victim still glide through the mansion’s halls.

Jillian receives a cryptic letter addressing her as Lydia—the name of her grandfather's victim—and a warning from a retired police chief: leave before they find your body at Indianhead Reservoir. For thirty years, a serial killer has haunted the county, purging young women.

Entries in her grandfather’s journal bind the county's most powerful family to a vanished German psychiatrist with whom he played chess, and to a killer whose savagery defies comprehension. On the summit above her home linger the ruins of an abandoned asylum. In the attic of an antique shop stands a trunk locked with ornamental keys.

With the help of a relentless antique dealer from Philadelphia and her own stubborn refusal to concede, Jillian confronts an evil that has festered in the town for generations.

The Hour of Anguish is a gothic thriller about inherited trauma, buried evil, and the monstrous price of unanswered questions.