"A Pleasure and a Calling" by Phil Hogan

Mr Heming owns a realty company. Everyone has seen his signs in town, even if most people don't know him well. But there is one thing no one knows about Mr Heming: he has made and kept a copy of the key for every house he has sold. He often pays "visits" using those keys--uninvited and unobserved--and takes the opportunity to gather interesting information and to right wrongs. This might sound somewhat harmless, if very odd, but Mr Heming is not entirely benign. He is gradually revealed to be more and more creepy, not least due to various questionable situations from his past that float slowly to the surface. His creepy habits are not new.

I enjoyed reading this well-written and suspenseful literary thriller. If I had one complaint about the book, it would be the fact that Mr Heming's success with women defied belief. I'm pretty sure Hogan was aware of this, because just exactly when I got to the point where I was about to roll my eyes and say, Oh, come on, he threw in an explanatory paragraph. It wasn't 100% believable (I can accept that a devious creeper could come across as harmless; I'm not so sure he could be found attractive by many, if any, women), but it was adequate.