The Last Caretaker
When Katie’s marriage fails, she realizes that everything else in her life —her job, her friends, her home — was bound up with her ex-husband. So she decides she needs a complete fresh start.
Then Bess, the best friend she’s known since university, offers her that new start: a job as caretaker at the nature preserve that Bess manages. The previous caretaker has left without notice, and the job needs filling right away. It comes with a house, a barn cat, and 927 acres of mostly wooded land. Katie isn’t really a nature-lover, but the job seems straightforward enough.
As soon as she moves in, Katie realizes that the previous caretaker, Grace, must have left really suddenly. There are still dishes in the sink, a box of cereal open on the counter, unreturned library books. Katie wonders whether Grace left voluntarily, and is she okay?
Then in the middle of the night, Katie is woken by three shrill rings at her doorbell. Ring, ring, ring. A desperate woman, with blood streaming from her forehead, is at the door, and she expects Katie to give her refuge. “Are you not the caretaker?” she asks. “It took me forever to get here…This is supposed to be Step One.”
The woman has a card, instructing her to come secretly to the caretaker’s house without being detected. The caretaker, she’s been told, will know the next steps leading her to a new life, safe from the abusive husband she’s escaped from.
Clearly Grace was involved in some kind of clandestine network. Katie wonders if this has something to do with why Grace left so suddenly. What have you gotten me into, Grace?
This is the beginning to a bumpy ride, a twisty novel of suspense and intrigue, as Katie tries to figure out who to trust and just how far she’s willing to go in making her own fresh start.
Jessica Strawser grew up in Pittsburgh and studied journalism at Ohio University, where she graduated in 2001 as the outstanding magazine senior for her year. She then moved to Cincinnati in 2001 to join Writers Digest as editorial assistant.
In the next few years she held several different roles at Writer’s Digest, followed by a series of positions in book editing at small nonfiction publishers, as well as a short stint in marketing and public relations. She married in 2006, and returned to Writer’s Digest in 2008 as editorial director. There her work with other writers inspired her to begin writing her own fiction, which she worked on at night while keeping up with her day job at WD, and giving birth to two children.
Despite her experience as an editor, writing fiction was a new challenge. She spent nearly five years writing and rewriting a novel, which ultimately did not sell. A new agent encouraged her to try again, and this time she landed a two-book deal from St. Martin’s Press in 2015. Those two books (Almost Missed You and Not That I Could Tell) appeared in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017 she scaled back her role at Writer’s Digest to an editor-at-large position, which freed her to focus on her own writing. Since then she has published four more novels and become a bestselling author. The Last Caretaker, released in late 2023, is her sixth novel.
Strawser lives in Cincinnati with her family.