A Stranger in the House

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of domestic abuse, death by suicide, and mental illness.

Karen Krupp is the protagonist of A Stranger in the House. She is a complex, deceitful character whose true nature is not revealed until the end of the novel. One can think of the character as having essentially two identities: Karen Krupp, quiet suburbanite and loving wife, and Georgina Traynor, scheming thief and murderer.

Karen Krupp is the character who is introduced at the beginning of the novel. She is a 30-year-old part-time bookkeeper for Cruikshank Funeral Homes, a job that her best friend and neighbor, Brigid Cruikshank, helped her get. Karen met her husband, Tom, three years ago while working as a temp at his accounting firm. They married two years prior to the start of the novel. Karen does not have any family or friends from before she moved to upstate New York. She claims to be from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

It is eventually revealed that Karen Krupp’s real name is Georgina Traynor. She was married to a man in Las Vegas named Robert Traynor, the murder victim, for three years. She meticulously planned to rob him of the money he was laundering through his antiquities business.