The Recluse: The Siege of the Fortress

February 1983. Elias Thorne, a young architectural historian from the University of Michigan, arrives at the VanDeusen Fortress on Hensell Road in Rose Township, Michigan - a mid-nineteenth-century Gothic Revival farmhouse that has just cleared foreclosure and is days away from its first sale outside the family in a hundred and thirty years. His assignment is forensic: document the structure before the new owners arrive. He has seven days.

What he finds is a dossier. A kitchen floor worn to ...