Quirky Sleuths. Big Murders. Very Bad Alibis. Home inspector Eliot Horne trusts houses because houses cannot charm him. They can sag, leak, rot, crack, settle, conceal, and occasionally contain a dead luxury-house flipper behind a newly finished accent wall. When Eliot discovers renovation celebrity Nolan Brist sealed inside a Heron Cove bluff house, suspicion falls quickly on Nolan's ex-wife and business partner. There is money at stake, an open house looming, an unstable property nobody wants discussed, and a real-estate market full of people who would prefer the walls stop talking. Eliot cannot make them stop. The baseboard was installed before the drywall mud had properly dried. That means the wall was closed in the wrong sequence, in a hurry, after something had already gone terribly wrong. Everyone else sees a beautifully staged house. Eliot sees a construction timeline with a corpse in the middle of it.