The furniture was all in the right rooms, paintings were hung on the wall, and Vinegar, their Maine coon, had started to occasionally come up from the basement where he’d been hiding.

Two months later, the weather had cooled, and Hen was beginning to feel that the house was theirs. They had closed on a single-family in West Dartford at the beginning of July, during one of the worst heat waves in Massachusetts history. He was in front of the living room bookshelf, rearranging. I can’t just look around at my new neighbors, then turn and leave.įine, Hen said, calling his bluff, knowing that he’d go alone if pressed. I need to stay at least an hour or else people will notice. That’s exactly what I can’t do, Hen said. If you hate it, you can turn around and come straight back. Hen hadn’t wanted to go, but Lloyd convinced her.

The two couples met at a neighborhood block party, the third Saturday in September. And that this is the beginning of a horrifying nightmare she may not live to escape. Then one night, when she comes face to face with Matthew in a dark parking lot, she realizes that he knows she’s been watching him, that she’s really on to him. The more Hen observes Matthew, the more she suspects he’s planning something truly terrifying.

Hen knows because she’s long had a fascination with this unsolved murder-an obsession she doesn’t talk about anymore, but can’t fully shake either.Ĭould her neighbor, Matthew, be a killer? Or is this the beginning of another psychotic episode like the one she suffered back in college, when she became so consumed with proving a fellow student guilty that she ended up hurting a classmate? The sports trophy looks exactly like one that went missing from the home of a young man who was killed two years ago. Finally, she’s found some stability and peace.īut when they meet the neighbors next door, that calm begins to erode as she spots a familiar object displayed on the husband’s office shelf. Hen (short for Henrietta) is an illustrator and works out of a studio nearby, and has found the right meds to control her bipolar disorder. Hen and her husband Lloyd have settled into a quiet life in a new house outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Catching a killer is dangerous-especially if he lives next doorįrom the hugely talented author of The Kind Worth Killing comes an exquisitely chilling tale of a young suburban wife with a history of psychological instability whose fears about her new neighbor could lead them both to murder.

Before she knew him novel