MUST- READ

The most terrifying books often don’t involve monsters or bloody gore; instead, their creep factor lies in the questions, the doubts, the shadows—like those in Jacqueline Baker’s skin crawler The Broken Hours. When a down-and-out man takes a job as a personal assistant in Depression-era Boston, he thinks he’ll be doing “light housework” for an eccentric writer. Cue a dark presence in the hallway, a vanishing child in the garden and a missing neighbour downstairs—oh, and a piece of gravestone found under his pillow. The strangeness gets harder and harder to explain away, especially when the man’s own mysterious past catches up with him.