The Lodger

Mr. and Mrs. Bunting are a respectable London couple sliding toward destitution when a strange, soft-spoken gentleman named Mr. Sleuth takes their rooms and pays in advance. His arrival should be their salvation, but his odd hours, his fear of women, and his midnight errands begin to trouble Mrs. Bunting as a killer known as The Avenger stalks the foggy streets outside. Marie Belloc Lowndes drew on the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders to build one of the earliest psychological thrillers, keeping the horror almost entirely inside her landlady’s mounting suspicion. The result is a quiet, claustrophobic study of a woman who fears what she knows and dreads what she may have to do about it. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB.