Gripping psychological suspense from the number one bestselling author of Then She Was Gone, as what begins as an innocent crush develops into a dangerous infatuation.
You’re back home after four years working abroad with a brand-new husband in tow.
You’re keen to find a place of your own. But for now you’re living with your big brother, camped out in his spare bedroom.
And then—quite unexpectedly—you meet the man next door.
He’s the head teacher of the local high school. He’s twice your age. And he’s devastatingly attractive. Soon you find you’re watching him. All the time.
But what you don’t know is that someone is watching you.
Or that what has started as an innocent crush is quickly turning into an obsession as dark as it is deadly.
Family secrets, illicit passion and an unexplained murder lie at the heart of Lisa Jewell’s gripping novel.
Release date:
August 6, 2019
Publisher:
Atria Books
Print pages:
336
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DC Rose Pelham kneels down; she can see something behind the kitchen door, just in front of the trash can. For a minute she thinks it’s a bloodstained twist of tissue, maybe, or an old bandage. Then she thinks perhaps it is a dead flower. But as she looks at it more closely she can see that it’s a tassel. A red suede tassel. The sort that might once have been attached to a handbag, or to a boot.
It sits just on top of a small puddle of blood, strongly suggesting that it had fallen there in the aftermath of the murder. She photographs it in situ from many angles, and then, with her gloved fingers, she plucks the tassel from the floor and drops it into an evidence bag, which she seals.
She stands up and turns to survey the scene of the crime: a scruffy kitchen, old-fashioned pine units, a green Aga piled with pots and pans, a large wooden table piled with table mats and exercise books and newspapers and folded washing, a small extension to the rear with a cheap timber glazed roof, double doors to the garden, a study area with a laptop, a printer, a shredder, a table lamp.
It’s an innocuous room, bland even. A kitchen like a million other kitchens all across the country. A kitchen for drinking coffee in, for doing homework and eating breakfast and reading newspapers in. Not a kitchen for dark secrets or crimes of passion. Not a kitchen for murdering someone in.
But there, on the floor, is a body, splayed facedown inside a large, vaguely kidney-shaped pool of blood. The knife that had been used is in the kitchen sink, thoroughly washed down with a soapy sponge. The attack on the victim had been frenzied: at least twenty knife wounds to the neck, back, and shoulders. But little in the way of blood has spread to other areas of the kitchen—no handprints, no smear, no spatters—leading Rose to the conclusion that the attack had been unexpected, fast, and efficient and that the victim had had little chance to put up a fight.
Rose takes a marker pen from her jacket pocket and writes on the bag containing the red suede tassel.
Description: “Red suede/suedette tassel.”
Location: “In front of fridge, just inside door from hallway.”
Date and time of collection: “Friday, March 24, 2017, 11:48 p.m.”
It’s probably nothing, she muses, just a thing fallen from a fancy handbag. But nothing was often everything in forensics.
Nothing could often be the answer to the whole bloody thing.
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