Excerpt from Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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She'd never broken into a house before. It was surprisingly easy.

The hardest part was crawling through the hedge, and beating through thorny ropes of brambles and spires of stinging nettles in the garden as her ankle throbbed and burned. The glass in the back door was as brittle and easy to break as the crust of ice on top of a puddle, and the key was still in the lock on the other side.

The kitchen was small, low-ceilinged. It smelled musty, as if it had been shut up for a long time. She turned around slowly, her eyes raking the gloom for signs of life. The plant on the windowsill had shriveled to a twist of dry leaves set in shrunken soil but there was a kettle on the gas stove and cups hanging from a row of hooks beneath the shelf on the wall, as if the occupant might come in at any moment to make a cup of tea. She shuddered, the hairs on the back of her neck rising.

"Hello?"

She spoke loudly, with a confidence she didn't feel. Her voice sounded peculiar; flat and almost comically Northern. "Hello—is anyone there?"

The quiet engulfed her. In a sudden flash of inspiration she fumbled to find the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a cheap plastic lighter. The circle of gold cast by the flame was small, but enough to show cream tiled walls, a calendar bearing a picture of a castle above the date July 2009, a kind-of vintage cupboard unit with glass-fronted doors at the top. She moved forward awkwardly, reaching out to support herself on the door frame as pain sank its teeth deeper into her leg. In the next room the glow of the tiny flame outlined a table by the window and a sideboard on which china ladies curtseyed and pirouetted to an invisible audience. The stairs rose from a narrow passageway. She paused at the foot of them. Staring up into the darkness she spoke again, softly this time, as if calling to a friend.

"Hello? Anyone home?"

Silence greeted her, and the faintest breath of some old-fashioned perfume drifted down, as if she'd disturbed air that had been still for a long time. She should go up to check that there was no one there, but her aching ankle and the sense of absolute stillness deterred her.

In the room at the front she let the flame go out, not wanting to risk its glow being spotted from outside. Drooping curtains were half pulled across the window, but the light from the streetlamp filtering through the gap was enough to show a sagging and lumpy settee pushed against one wall, with a blanket made up of crocheted squares in clashing colors covering its back. Cautiously she peered out, looking for Dodge, but the pool of light around the streetlamp was still and unbroken. She sagged against an armchair and breathed a little easier.

It had been an old person's house, that much was obvious. The television was huge and comically outdated, and an electric bar fire stood in front of the boarded-up grate. Against the front door a pile of mail had gathered like a drift of autumn leaves.

She limped back into the kitchen and turned on the tap above the sink, letting the water run through the clanking pipes for a few moments before cupping her hands beneath it and drinking. She wondered who owned it and what had happened to them; whether they'd gone into a home, or died. When someone died their house got cleared out, surely? That's what had happened to Gran's, anyway. Within a week of the funeral all the clothes and pictures and plates and pans, as well as Gran's vast collection of china pigs and the fragments of Jess's shattered childhood had been packed up and dispersed so the council could get the house ready for the new tenant.

The darkness felt mossy and damp against her skin. Goosebumps stood on her arms beneath her fake-leather jacket. Maybe the owner had died and not actually been discovered? Some masochistic instinct brought out by the dark and the quiet made her picture a body decaying in the bed upstairs. She dismissed it briskly, reasserting common sense. What harm could the dead do to you anyway? A corpse couldn't split your lip or steal your money, or close its fingers round your neck until stars danced behind your eyes.

Excerpted from Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey. Copyright © 2015 by Iona Grey. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.