Publication Date: March 3, 2026
The Devil enters through doors left open…
On the isolated Eastern Shore of Virginia, Edith is a healer, a woman of knowledge—and a woman watched. Shadows move where they shouldn’t. Whispers creep through the dark. Terrified she has opened her home to the Devil, Edith makes a desperate choice.
Claire doesn’t believe in ghosts—until she returns home to care for her dying father and finds her childhood house… listening. As one sleepless night bleeds into the next, she becomes convinced something is stirring beneath the floorboards. Something that has waited a long time to rise.
Is the house haunted? What compels this lurking darkness? As the danger mounts, Edith and Claire will discover they’ll need each other to survive. But they are separated by four hundred years. And time is running out for them both.
Called home to spend time with her dying father, Claire begins to suspect her childhood house is haunted.
Author Jacquie Walters uses dual timelines 400 years apart to build suspense in Turn Off the Light. At the center of the story is a home on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
The story alternates between Claire’s experiences with strange noises and her father’s references to “the Devil” alongside a healer named Edith who lived in the past.
The author adds suspense to the mix with the unsolved disappearance of Claire’s sister, Gabby. A surprise twist reveals an unexpected culprit. The two timelines intersect in a well-plotted manner, letting Claire’s young daughter, Julia, take a turn in the spotlight.
Turn Off the Light features a fresh take on a haunted house mystery.
Jacquie Walters is the author of Dearest and an Emmy-nominated writer who has sold five pilots in the last three years. She is currently adapting Melissa de la Cruz’s bestselling book series Blue Bloods for television and has placed projects at Apple TV+, ABC Network, Paramount Plus, iTV, CJ Entertainment, and others. In all, she has written and produced over 100 episodes of television. Walters graduated from the Novel Writing Program at Stanford University and is passionate about layered mysteries, psychological anomalies, and characters with everything to hide. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and beloved Golden Retriever.
