Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Saltwater Mansions The Woman Who Disappeared and Other Untold Stories.

by David Whitehouse

'A proper read-it-in-one-go book, opening up an advent calendar of lives behind the doors of a block of flats'
ADAM KAY, author of THIS IS GOING TO HURT

'I inhaled it in a sitting - what an exhilarating book. Brave, revealing and unexpected'
CATHY RENTZENBRINK, author of THE LAST ACT OF LOVE

Margate is in the grip of a heatwave when David Whitehouse stumbles across the mysterious story of a local woman who lived on the ground floor of Saltwater Mansions, a block of flats not far from the sea. On paper, Caroline Lane was unremarkable. She paid her mortgage every month. She always paid her bills. But nobody had seen or heard from her for 13 years, and no one had ever come looking. She had disappeared completely.

David quickly becomes as fascinated by this missing woman as the residents of Saltwater Mansions, all of whom have their own theories to share, and their own unique stories to tell. As his obsession grows, David unearths vital clues that private detectives and amateur investigators alike have failed to spot. But the closer he gets to the truth, the clearer it becomes that this mystery was never meant to be solved, and that some stories don't want to be told. What if this one was never about Caroline Lane at all?

From acclaimed and award-winning author David Whitehouse, Saltwater Mansions is an astonishing work of creative non-fiction blending reportage and memoir to explore the extraordinary hidden lives of ordinary people, the impact of grief, and the dangerous allure of taking true crime stories into our own hands.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime

224 pages, Hardcover

Published June 12, 2025

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raced through this. An interesting take on life, loss, change, and what it means to know someone. The sections on gentrification / developments in Margate felt underdeveloped - could have been cut down or expanded upon, but they feel slightly awkward as drafted. Thought the reflections on true crime (and journalism), and what we’re entitled to know about other people, were really well done.

[Carole Tyrrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fictionalised story of a mysterious disappearance that actually happened in Cliftonville, Margate in Kent. But the truth is stranger than fiction and never more so than in the vanishing of Caroline Lane as she’s called in the book from the fictional Saltwater Mansions. How often does a writer discover a story so strange, enigmatic and compelling literally on their doorstep?
45 year old Caroline moved into Saltwater Mansions in the summer of 2005 and was seen by anyone there in 2009. The bills were paid automatically by her bank, no-one came looking for her and she was never reported missing.
‘She had vanished but was still there. The heart of a mystery. The ghost in a ghost story.’
The narrator’s hairdressers tells him about the mystery and he talks to the few residents who still remember her and is given a huge box of mail from the flat when it was finally entered years after Caroline had ostensibly gone as the flat was to be a forced sale. 2 yards of unopened mail was found behind the door and is given to the narrator. But it contained no personal mail such as birthday and Christmas cards. The minutes of the Saltwater Mansions management company meeting in 2009, three days prior to Caroline going missing record her causing quite a memorable stir. She demanded that the accounts be audited by an independent 3rd party as she trusted none of those present. There was also the matter of the fire escape. She said that as she would never use it, being on the ground floor, so why should she pay for it? The meeting broke up in disarray. 3 days later she was gone apparently for good although no one knew that.
He starts looking and finds birth records, electoral register entries and finds traces of possible family members but none of Caroline.
‘…the texture of her life lay in what could not be seen; in the shadow, rather than what cast it.’
11 years later, in the spring of 2020, a solicitors letter was sent to her flat reminding her that she owed £13k in maintenance charges and if they were still unpaid then action would be taken. The next year, in 2021, with the debt having increased to £19k, the next letter stated that there would be a forced sale of her flat. Now at last they could go in although they were apprehensive about what awaited them. No dust, no cobwebs greeted them. Instead a huge 4 poster with candles at each corner, red hair dye in the bath, the bedsheets still held her shape. The enigma remained. The flat was sold and Caroline’s belongings were dispersed.
There is a resolution of a sort at the end but he never meets Caroline.
The author weaves in his childhood memories of day trips to Margate and also the town’s fluctuating fortunes. The collapse in working class holidaymakers and the arrival of gentrification. There is also the eager anticipation of the coming of the Turner Contemporary. Cliftonville was named the fourth most deprived area in the UK. In the early 200’s, local authorities began exporting their vulnerable people out to coastal areas and refugees also came changing the neighbourhood. Today it is a little rough, a little rundown – neat tidy houses belonging to DFL’s (Down From London) next to shabby rundown HMOS.
An intriguing novella with no real ending and a mystery which may never be solved. It reminded me of Iain Sinclair’ s ‘Rodinsky’s Room’ in the search for a vanished person who has also left his body shape in his bedsheets. The final chapter in which the rise of the online detective and ‘grief junkies’ in the sad case of Nicola Bulley is one of the scariest. Motivated by a desire to discover ‘the truth’ as they see it, they seem to get in everyone’s way and hamper the investigation.
A book about how easy it can be to vanish if you really don’t want to be found.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the mix of David Whitehouse trying to solve the true crime mystery of Caroline Lane and weaving into this the stories of other characters in his life and in Caroline's story.

[Rob Sedgwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Whitehouse is a good writer, as evidenced by this book, and he has chosen an interesting subject: a woman who disappeared from a flat in Margate. The story behind Caroline is the subject, and there are many stories within the story, as we also learn the life stories of several other people in the building, including the new owner of the flat. If you enjoyed A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip, you'll like this; they are both about ordinary people who do extraordinary things, and someone's obsessive search to get to the bottom of it.

Whitehouse is a novelist, and this feels like a book with characters in it, even though it's a non-fiction work. Good writers bring the minor characters to life as well as the main ones, and there are plenty of people in Margate with fascinating back stories! I found myself getting impatient, though, wanting to get back to the main story, reading the detours into other people's lives, interesting as they were.

What it lacks, though, is a well-resolved ending. A sequel feels inevitable!

I hope Whitehouse continues to write this sort of creative non-fiction book, as I like the style. Finding subjects is going to be tough, though!

[Miles Kantolinna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quality stuff, Trev who gave it 1 star doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Fantastically written, finding a way to draw emotion out of the lives of seemingly ordinary people

[Lesley · Rating 2 out of 5]

A woman leaves her flat in a shared apartment block telling no one there & doesn’t return. The mortgage & other bills continue to be paid. However, debt accrues from those items where payment cannot be automated. 13 years later a large enough debt has accumulated on charges for communal maintenance work to result in a forced sale of the property.
Other residents of the building know little of the woman, she chooses to keep herself to herself. Once she ‘disappears’ people start to speculate on what has happened & build up various scenarios. The author of Saltwater Mansions is one of those people.
There is no real reason to suspect foul play & seemingly no one reports her as a missing person.
In the absence of much information, David Whitehouse builds a sometimes interesting portrait of other residents in the building, share his own life experiences and continues to formulate theories re the missing woman.
I won’t reveal what he does eventually discover. Suffice to say it isn’t anything that concerns anyone other than the people directly involved, who clearly communicate they do not wish to share it with others.
Whitehouse respects this but feels he’s due more, particularly because of all the effort he has put in. There are others who have contributed to his research who express astonishment that those involved do not wish to share their story. My astonishment was at people seeming to think they almost had a right to know.
To me this is a book about how people appropriate other people’s stories - or what they think are other people’s stories. There is some attempted justification by saying people who have had traumatic experiences have empathy for others & want to help. There may be truth in this & some people welcome sharing experiences- not all though. If someone had conducted that level of research on me, I would have felt very uncomfortable & certainly the thought of stalking would come to mind. My response to ‘but we were concerned’ would have been “but not enough to ever report it to the authorities “.

Two things came to mind on finishing the book. The first was a passage from Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow

‘The psychologist, who had taught me how to answer the question about how many children I had, also told me an important thing when I had an interview with her before sending James to see her. “Never feel that you’re obliged to show your pain to the world,” she said. “Very few people deserve to see your tears.”’

The second, more tangentially, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara & The Sun

‘Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded. So I’m glad I decided as I did.’

Which in a very broad sense says to me we see everything through the filter of ourselves. The essence of what we see is in us, not them.

As a footnote, many years ago I was directly involved in helping someone ‘disappear’ from a domestic abuse situation. The person they were fleeing was articulate & cunning. They managed to elicit enough sympathy to get individuals to divulge confidential information they were privy to in their jobs. The only people who handled it responsibly were the police. Trying to find someone merely to satisfy your own curiosity can sometimes have serious consequences.

[Lady Fancifull · Rating 4 out of 5]

The extraordinary lives and stories of ordinary people : hidden depths 3.5 raised

Although this is, on the initial telling, a piece of non-fiction, a journalistic investigation into a woman who vanished from her life in a Margate flat at the tail end of the first decade of this century, Whitehouse describes it as ‘creative non-fiction’, because identification of identities, for reasons which do become clear, have been changed.

Along the way, the life stories of other people, with unchanged identities, including Whitehouse’s own family, are drawn in.

The result is fascinating, but, as I neared the end, I began to have, as Whitehouse did himself, some reservations about its writing at all. Which I guess is why he got creative with his non-fiction and blurred the edges of his story, to protect the integrity and identity of some within the book.

On one level, then, despite these efforts to protect integrity, and my absorption in the writing and the stories of small, un-famous lives, I have been left troubled – particularly as I discovered that a Daily Mail journalist (of, course, who else : a publication which trades in the whipping up of click-bait worst excess) did the delving and revelation of the real identities. Which, really, had no need to be outed. No crime was committed here, and it was not, actually, a need-to-know by strangers. Had Whitehouse not published this book, that journalist, working for that nasty rag, would not have been spitefully motivated to uncover the hidden identity behind that ‘creative’ non-fiction

Whitehouse had his own reasons for getting hooked and obsessed by the story, which he reveals, but I could wish he HAD made this more fictional, less identifiable. I have been left feeling a little soiled, an intruder into someone else’s privacy

Library copy

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling book that I genuinely enjoyed, particularly for its anthropological take on Margate and the way it brings a wide range of people’s stories to life. The sense of place is strong, and the idea of uniting these narratives through longing, grief, circumstance and location is both clever and effective.

I’ve taken one star off my rating because, despite the overall flow, some of the information felt jarring. At times, the prose was overly verbose and the pacing a little formulaic, to the point where a few sentences felt oddly artificial. Elsewhere, the opposite was true: some lines were missing descriptive detail and came across as clumsy. The repetition of the word “tremendous” in quick succession toward the end also made the writing feel rushed.

The fictionalised section about the now 58-year-old Caroline Lane felt grating; she’s written more like a woman in her late seventies, with aching joints, irritation at young people, and days spent quietly reading and painting.

There were a few factual and timeline issues, particularly in Beth’s story, which I hope are clarified or corrected in future reprints. For example, Rosa is said to have been born in 1966, auditioned for Phantom at 21, met Ronnie six years later and then became pregnant with Beth, which would place Beth’s birth around 1993. However, the text states that Beth was already two years old in 1992. Additionally, Michael is described as having a "corporate job selling paint" which feels like a stretch unless he was the CEO of Dulux.

These are minor niggles in an otherwise thoughtful and engaging book. Overall, the ambition of weaving together so many lives, connected by place and emotional undercurrents, makes this a rewarding and memorable read.

[Nigeyb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a glowing review of Saltwater Mansions: The Woman Who Disappeared and Other Untold Stories and it is an interesting if ultimately somewhat anticlimactic read. It blends investigative journalism, memoir, and a portrait of Margate, and is as much about the author as it is about Caroline Lane, a woman who apparently disappeared 13 years earlier.

Throughout we learn about many other personal histories which sometimes felt like superflous padding.

The lack of a tidy resolution is somewhat frustrating and a bit of internet searching reveals information not contained in the book. Some deliberately, some because David Whitehouse isn't much of a sleuth.

My advice to anyone considering reading this book is just to accept it on its own terms. It's more about Margate, the author, the drama of every day lives, and less about the disappearance that David Whitehouse uses to frame the narrative.

3/5

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book about a missing woman, although I found a couple of details a bit puzzling. For example the writer says someone travelling from the south west to the north west of England would go the long way round the M25 to avoid seeing signs for Sunningdale. We travel from the south west to the north west regularly and don’t go anywhere near either Sunningdale or the M25, so that puzzled me. Isn’t Sunningdale off the M3? Maybe I didn’t understand. And then there was another detail about a car crash, that didn’t quite make sense to me.

I found the detail about Nicola Bulley a strange addition to the book. I live not far from where she disappeared, and the whole circus surrounding her fate I found very upsetting, remembering that she left small children without their mum. I just wanted the whole media circus to go away. But I suppose that’s impossible, these days. That leaves me wondering what Caroline Lane would think about this whole book, and that leaves me feeling a bit uncomfortable. I’m glad the author went to the lengths he did to disguise true identities.

Overall, a gripping story, well told, and the author can certainly write. I’ve had a look at his other titles and ordered one. Interesting to see what else he has written.

[Jo_Scho_Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margate. A traditional British seaside town where the seagulls shriek and the day trippers buy ice creams and build sandcastles by the dozen. And where a local woman, Caroline Lane, goes missing. She quietly disappears from her ground floor flat in Saltwater Mansions where she’s lived for twenty years. Her mortgage and bills continue to be paid for thirteen years yet there is no sign of her. Where did she go? Will she return?

David Whitehouse becomes fascinated in her story and as he delves into her life, he talks to Caroline’s neighbours and reveals the stories that have shaped their lives. He learns how they came to live out their lives in this block of flats on the Southeast coast and what they think of the mysterious Caroline Lane.

This is way more than a missing person mystery, it’s a wonderfully observant contemplation of human life. I was fascinated with Caroline but also loved getting to know the Saltwater Mansion residents - and the author himself.

It’s an original and accomplished concept which is beautifully written and made me pause for thought so often, thinking about life and loss and death. And had me in tears by the final few lines.

Magnificent

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author David Whitehouse learns about the strange tale of Caroline Lane through one of the mothers at his school. Caroline was 45 when she lived in Flat 9, on the ground floor of Saltwater Mansions. She was stylish, argumentative and confrontational. Having been involved in an argument during a fraught residents' meeting, she vanishes. Years later, over a decade's mail is swept up off the floor - there are dirty dishes in the sink, clothes hanging out to try, but no sign of the previous occupant.

Thus begins Whitehouse's obsession into where Caroline Lane vanished to. This is also an examination of where she lived - Margate, a now run-down seaside town. It is also an exploration of why people vanish, who would care if someone did and of family, their stories and memories. It revolves around the time the author lost his father, when other characters in the book have elderly relatives, of loss and love and grief. It was a moving read which made me think and would be ideal for book groups.

[Miss Charlotte R Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love David’s writing. Every book of his is a masterpiece in its own way and the diversity of topics that he has written demonstrates the depth of his talent. The consistent message within his writing is one of the power of relationships.

Saltwater Mansions has clearly been a labour of love and the writer has poured a lot of himself into it, in the same way that he must have done when writing About a Son.

The links that he makes between the mystery of the disappearance of Caroline and the unfinished stories he feels he had with his father as well as the human instinct to find answers when at our lowest really moved me.

I loved it and I will think about it often.

[Vicki Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea when I reserved this book that it was written by the same author who wrote About a Son so it was a nice surprise when I realised!

This is a quick 200 pager which will keep you gripped in a non page turner sort of way (if that makes sense!) It’s a fascinating look at a local mystery while revealing stories of those surrounding it, including at times David himself and of course, Margate.

I will look forward to any new releases from David now as he writes so poignantly about real stores and I’m always here for that.

[Justin Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the premise of this book.
I found the mystery around the tenant's disappearance fascinating, but on too many occasions the author digressed on to other things and the book became very diluted
Admittedly some of the stories around the other people living in the building were really interesting,but unfortunately as a whole the book was a bit unsatisfying for me
3 is a bit harsh but 3.5 would seem fair

[iCod · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED THIS SO HARD
I listened to it on audible and the narrators pronunciation is a bit shit at the beginning, but go past that because I think it's just nerves and he gets better.

This is an incredible hybrid of true crime, non-fiction memoir and reflection and I just thought it was amazing.

A great achievement.

[Penelope Pitstop · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Very interesting, a kind of Pandora’s box of stories. All sorts of grief and trauma, alongside the story of Margate. Difficult to describe this book as it goes off in all sorts of directions. Always wonderfully written but don’t expect solutions. And also I couldn’t always keep track of who each story was about.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to this on audio. Fascinating premise and started really well but ultimately a little disappointing and left me feeling quite flat. I found the narrator’s voice (the author?) quite annoying, and there were several grammatical errors that grated on me.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved every aspect of this book from the observations about Margate and the window into many peoples lives in saltwater mansions, to the way David elegantly weaved his personal story into that of the mystery of Caroline’s. Beautifully written and thought provoking.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who could disappear with no-one noticing, I was intrigued by the first part of the book.
People would be able to garner some of the truth of who I am from what is held within my flat, BUT not the darker thoughts.
No-one cares.

[Donna McLean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible work of hybrid non-fiction. Absolutely one of THE books of the year.

[liza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audio is like a mystery/true crime podcast.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute genius. Pure and simple

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It's not fiction as such but tells stories of people's lives and I love the idea that everyone has a story and they all deserve to be told.

[LB · Rating 4 out of 5]

really beautiful, quiet, heartbreaking meditation on loss in many forms

[Thomas Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skillfully told, though the main story thread does risk becoming a little tedious. Made up for by the other focuses.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our writer goes down a rabbit hole following a woman who disappears from a Margate tower block. An excellent story that takes in Margate gentrification, grief tourism and Nicola Bulley.

[Trevor Harvey · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a con.

Ostensibly, it examines the disappearance of Caroline Lane from her flat in Margate. However, I suspect that when the author realised that there wasn't much to say about this, he realised he had to widen his remit in order to make a book. So, he examined other people's lives, hidden, heretofore unrecorded, forgotten.

Whitehouse writes eloquently, persuasively, but this reader wasn't having any of it. I wanted to return to the story of Caroline Lane, but, ultimately there was nothing to say.

I am glad I borrowed the book from my local library and didn't waste £18.99 on purchasing it.