At 4:47am, Nora Vass wakes to her dog growling at the bedroom door.

The front door is open. The deadbolt is withdrawn. Cool air comes through the gap. Someone has been on her porch. Someone has opened her door. But the smart home security system shows nothing. No alert. No entry log. No motion detected. According to every sensor in the house, nobody was there.

Nora is an architect. She rebuilt this house from the frame. She specified every system, every connection, every device. She knows this building the way a surgeon knows anatomy.

And she knows when something is wrong.

The thermostat adjusts itself at 3am. The voice assistant responds to commands she did not give. Lights turn off in sequence as she walks past them, as if the house is closing behind her. Her ex-husband drives five hours from Sydney because she sounds different on the phone. Her best friend stops calling because Nora sounds paranoid. Her therapist increases sessions because the symptoms look like post-separation anxiety.

Everyone has an explanation. Firmware glitch. User error. Stress.

But Nora does not have anxiety. Nora has evidence. A timestamp that moves. A device log that contradicts what she saw with her own eyes. A security camera that records an empty room at the exact moment she heard footsteps in the hallway.

She hires Dan Cole, a security consultant who specialises in compromised systems. What Dan finds is not a glitch. It is architecture. Sophisticated, patient, and already months ahead of them.

Someone has been inside the smart home network for weeks. Watching through the cameras. Listening through the microphones. Learning her schedule, her habits, her passwords, her fears. Turning every device she installed to make her home safe into an instrument of surveillance.

The attacker is not breaking in. The attacker has been inside the entire time.

Set in the Adelaide Hills, Australia. For readers who loved The Woman in the Window, Behind Closed Doors, and Dark Matter, but want a thriller grounded in technology that already exists in your home.

The Books

Three books. One escalating nightmare.