False Refuge – Kobo eBook

The first thing the stranger tells Samira Vale is true.

Floodwater has driven families into St Bede’s, an old residential school above the drowned streets of Elmsmere. Samira is responsible for the night shift. She has a board with the residents’ names, keys to doors she hopes she will never need to open, and a condemned west wing that everyone has been told to stay out of. Then a man appears at the service entrance and tells her where to find a missing boy.

The child is there. Samira brings him back alive.

When the man returns, he knows something about a family sheltering inside. Samira can verify part of what he says. The rest sounds urgent enough to act on before morning. He asks her to let him in through a different door. This time, the people who stand to lose the most are the people she has heard the least from.

Soon the shelter’s room assignments, corridors and entrances reflect decisions that began with a stranger on a wet step. Samira can trace how his words got inside. What she cannot yet see is who will be in reach when he comes back. And when the next warning arrives, there may be a life at stake whether she believes him or not.

False Refuge is a supernatural horror novel about a place built to keep people safe and a visitor who discovers that telling the truth once can get him closer than any lie.