This definitely wasn't great but it was different. It's about a private detective named Houston McIver who plies his trade in El Paso.

He formerly worked with border police and still has a lot of contacts from those days, on both sides of the law.

The story begins with extremely familiar genre conventions. McIver hasn't had any business in a long time and is wondering how he's going to pay his rent, when a beautiful woman walks in and hires him.

Someone pretty much immediately starts trying to kill him and he follows his client back to her house, a stately home that's belonged to generations of her family, the Macgruders.

This is the "horror house" of the title but it's not actually horror in any way. This book could have been nudged a bit to deliver some eerie horror house type of stuff but it wasn't.

Readers might feel like Woody is just making this up as he went along, and wrapped things up at the end really quickly.

The cover illustration, which is pretty nice, gives away what was probably supposed to be a big reveal at the end.

The Siamese cat is an interesting element, too. What makes this story stand out is that McIver has a pet Siamese cat and he brings it with him on his case. Just puts it in his pocket and then the cat is one of the characters in the house, interacting with everyone else all the time.

I'd never seen that before. But it's a fairly tepid book though agreeable enough.

The first line is "The new gold-leaf sign on my office door had set me back seventy-five bucks and I was very proud of it".