Service

by Lauren Mooney

Danielle MacKinnon's nearly thirty and still hasn't got her life sorted. Her job as a PA to the blithely privileged Jeannie is boring, and existentially depressing, and now, after a break-up, she needs to find somewhere to live for the next two months.

Her best friends Ben and Anita are keen to help, but Danielle's broke, burning through couches and good-will, until she gets an unexpected proposal from Jeannie. Danielle can stay at Westerley, the sprawling Yorkshire estate where Jeannie grew up. They need someone to look after the old place anyway. She'd be doing them a favour.

At Westerley, Danielle luxuriates in her idyllic, borrowed life as lady of the manor - but the house is big, old and uneasy. It's a strange place to live alone. The sleep paralysis that began in London is beginning to worsen.

And then Jeannie arrives unannounced. Working for her, serving her, living in her house, the razor-thin boundaries begin Danielle and her boss begin to dissolve. Soon their relationship slides into something older, stranger and harder to name.

Something is happening at Westerley. Things where they shouldn't be. The shadow of a maid sweeping in the dawn light. But is the house really haunted? Or is Danielle?

Genres: Contemporary

352 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication June 25, 2026

Reviews

[Blair]

(4.5) Service has such an immediately captivating voice, it was impossible for me to put it down once I’d got started. For a while, we follow our narrator, Danielle, as she bounces around London between parties, friends’ flats, and her increasingly absurd job as general dogsbody to Jeannie, a sort of posh lady-who-lunches running a vaguely defined charity with the appropriate moniker of Hodgepodge. Danielle’s narration has that snappy, chatty, witty energy you get in these girl-adrift-in-the-city novels, reminding me of everything from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Not Working to The Rachel Incident.

Then, though, it starts to mutate into something else. Danielle is temporarily homeless after a breakup; a confluence of events leads her to agree to stay at Westerley, Jeannie’s country house, as its temporary caretaker. She starts having night terrors, seeing a shadowy figure in the corner of rooms; can never quite figure out when she’s asleep or awake, whether everything that’s happening is real. Meanwhile, her job, never exactly dignified, slides further and further towards something that looks a lot like servitude.

Maybe the power dynamic was just too different: because Jeannie was my boss, not my housemate; because it was her house and, more than that, her land I was walking across now. Everything as far as the eye could see belonged to her. It made her power over me feel, frankly, less benign than it had in London, and more ancient.

What Service reveals itself as, in its thornier second half, is a very modern gothic novel: the class divide as a ghost story. It’s not so much about a straightforward haunting and more of a paean to the people who get scrubbed out of history so the Jeannies of the world can keep pottering about with their spurious pet projects. There’s a particularly great sequence where Danielle, fully transmuted, wanders the corridors of the house in and out of time, seeing how the labour of those who came before her has been absorbed into the very fabric of Westerley, before she gets snapped back to reality.

What’s most impressive is that Mooney pulls these tonal shifts off without losing the voice that makes the first half so enjoyable – it’s never less than a delight, and never loses sight of Danielle’s humour. It can’t have been easy to weave such disparate threads together and capture these themes within a light-hearted and irreverent voice. An excellent debut.

I received an advance review copy of Service from the publisher through NetGalley.

[Oliver Lewis]

DNF

[Lyndsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tricky book to rate, as it took me a long time to read - not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it’s been a really busy month. I think I’d go for 3.5 stars, as I thought some parts were genuinely unsettling, but then it didn’t go far enough with horror elements. It’s one I’ll be musing about, and hope to discuss it with others to gain more appreciation!

[Laura Gardner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brilliant concept and such fun to read. But I just felt so much MORE could have been done with it. The book felt like 2 books sandwiched together, the first half a reflection of how difficult being in your twenties is, living in London and feeling isolated, in part because the world was built for rich people, and not for you. And that bit was fab. Then the second half ended up being a haunted house and really cool concept of connecting to a house’s history. And that was great too. But I didn’t QUITE understand how the two halves related to each other, nor felt we got a proper explanation of the logistics of the haunted house outside of “it was a dream”-esque ending. I also am not a fan of books without chapters, and this book had none, rather 4 parts splitting up the 300+ pages. I liked it enough that I would tell other people to read it if they were keen on the concept, but I do think the book wasn’t quite sure what it was - a horror book or a contemporary fiction - and while sometimes that’s ok (Bunny by Awad) for me this one fell a little flat. Thank you for the read, and good luck to the author, who has such a personable way of writing.

[Always Reading Between The Wines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Service by Lauren Mooney
⭐️⭐️⭐️

Danielle is bored at work; in need of a place to stay following a break up and quickly using up the good will and support extended to her by friends and family. When her boss Jeannie says that Danielle can stay at her family's sprawling estate (she'd actually be doing Jeannie a favour after all, keeping an eye on the place), Danielle jumps at the chance. At first, she is living her best life as lady of the manor, but she quickly begins to spiral left to her own thoughts and imagination. So when Jeannie turns up unannounced, the relationship between the two of them becomes something fraught and difficult...

The classic ghost story in a modern setting gave this story an interesting twist. There are darker moments with an intriguing premise and the promise of something deeper. Whilst the opening part of the novel is obviously required to set out the characters and scene, the latter part of the novel is where the majority of the intrigue and story lie, therefore this section of the book I found much more appealing. Definitely an author to watch.

[Honey · Rating 2 out of 5]

An entertaining read with a strong theme and presence. Connecting past and present by contrasting how servitude has changed (and in some ways stayed the same) through time was interesting. The antagonists were believable, and the ghost story premise started out as inviting. However, the build up was meandering which made it difficult to keep interested in the main cast. The pacing had much left to be desired with the climax of past and present merging feeling too brief and rather sudden. It has been advertised as a horror but there is not enough tension or frightening imagery to make that an accurate description.

Thank you for the proof.

[Dominika]

This is a fever dream of a book. Very claustrophobic.
It completely throws you off balance. Just like the main character, you begin to wonder if things are real, if you maybe skipped a paragraph by accident because change so fast. One minute you think you know what's going on the next you're questioning yourself. Just like the main character.

It has a very creepy vibe to it and the best way to describe it is fever dream.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you NetGalley for my copy.

[The reader in the dark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A creepy ghost story set in a contemporary environment. The main protagonist was interesting and the overall story was engaging. This was really a book of two halves. The first, introduced setting and main characters, and the second half dealt with the more unusual elements in the story. Overall an enjoyable read but I would have preferred the first half to be shorter which would have allowed the second (and more engaging) half to be longer.