A riveting psychological thriller where memories may be the most dangerous things of all.
Simon and Schuster
April 2007
On Sale: April 3, 2007
Featuring: Kay Lansing; Peter Carrington
336 pages ISBN: 0743264916 EAN: 9780743264914 Hardcover Add to Wish List
At the center of her
novel is Kay Lansing, who has grown up in Englewood, New Jersey,
daughter of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful
Carrington
family. Their mansion -- a historic seventeenth-century
manor house
transported stone by stone from Wales in 1848 -- has a
hidden chapel.
One day, accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay
succumbs to
curiosity and sneaks into the chapel. There, she overhears a
quarrel
between a man and a woman who is demanding money from him.
When she
says that this will be the last time, his caustic response
is: "I heard
that song before."
That same evening, the
Carringtons hold
a formal dinner dance after which Peter Carrington, a student at
Princeton, drives home Susan Althorp, the nineteen-year-old
daughter of
neighbors. While her parents hear her come in, she is not in
her room
the next morning and is never seen or heard from
again.
Throughout
the years, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Peter Carrington.
At age
forty-two, head of the family business empire, he is still
"a person of
interest" in the eyes of the police, not only for Susan
Althorp's
disappearance but also for the subsequent drowning death of
his own
pregnant wife in their swimming pool.
Kay
Lansing, now
living in New York and working as a librarian in Englewood,
goes to see
Peter Carrington to ask for permission to hold a cocktail
party on his
estate to benefit a literacy program, which he later grants.
Kay comes
to see Peter as maligned and misunderstood, and when he
begins to court
her after the cocktail party, she falls in love with him.
Over the
objections of her beloved grandmother Margaret O'Neil, who
raised her
after her parents' early deaths, she marries him. To her
dismay, she
soon finds that he is a sleepwalker whose nocturnal
wanderings draw him
to the spot at the pool where his wife met her
end.
Susan
Althorp's mother, Gladys, has always been convinced that Peter
Carrington is responsible for her daughter's disappearance,
a belief
shared by many in the community. Disregarding her husband's
protests
about reopening the case, Gladys, now terminally ill, has
hired a
retired New York City detective to try to find out what
happened to her
daughter. Gladys wants to know before she
dies.
Kay, too,
has developed gnawing doubts about her husband. She believes
that the
key to the truth about his guilt or innocence lies in the
scene she
witnessed as a child in the chapel and knows she must learn the
identity of the man and woman who quarreled there that day.
Yet, she
plunges into this pursuit realizing that "that knowledge may
not be
enough to save my husband's life, if indeed it deserves to
be saved."
What Kay does not even remotely suspect is that uncovering
what lies
behind these memories may cost her her own life.
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