The Invited starts strong but slowly slips into something less sinister, missing the mark on delivering sustainable malevolence. There was plenty of promise for what seemed like a typical paranormal setup — a city couple trades in their fast-paced lifestyle for rural Vermont, fueled by an inheritance that allows them to take a year off and build their own home. The land used to be owned by a witch named Hattie Breckenridge, who was hung by the area townsfolk. 

On the front end, McMahon sets everything up nicely enough with a story that keeps you unsettled on whether the townsfolk don't like newcomers or that maybe there is something to a few supernatural happenings. This part of the story works well enough until our protagonist, Helen, begins to buy up artifacts connected to the Breckenridge family — including a beam made from the tree they hung Hattie. Say what? Her husband develops his own obsession, chasing an elusive white deer that some say is Hattie attempting to lure men to their doom. 

The story eventually settles into a lower gear as the couple befriends a local teenage girl who vandalized their home during its construction. Olive is quick to give up on trying to chase the couple off the land (where she believes Hattie buried a treasure) and make nice, mostly because she is an outcast with one friend and a father who developed his own house remodeling obsession after Olive's wife flew the coup for another man (or so the story goes). 

As Olive's story develops — the quest for treasure, finding out what really happened to her mom, and her connection to Hattie — it takes over the plot and promptly leaves a terrifying ghost story setup behind. This might have been fine had the book been billed as a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys/Scobby Do-styled mystery but not so much as a real ghost story. Fortunately, McMahon is a good writer. Her writing, but not the plot, keeps things interesting enough to keep going even as it becomes clear this isn't much of a ghost story.