“The night they killed our neighbors, we never heard a
thing.”
In a quiet suburban neighborhood, in a
house only one door away, a family is brutally murdered
for no apparent reason. And you think to yourself: It
could have been us. And you start to wonder: What
if we’re next? Linwood Barclay,
critically acclaimed author of No Time for
Goodbye, brings terror closer than ever before
in a thriller where murder strikes in the place we feel
safest of all. Promise Falls isn’t the kind of community
where a family is shot to death in their own home. But
that is exactly what happened to the Langleys one
sweltering summer night, and no one in this small upstate
New York town is more shocked than their next-door
neighbors, Jim and Ellen Cutter. They visited for the
occasional barbecue and their son, Derek, was friends with
the Langleys’ boy, Adam; but how well did they really know
their neighbors?
That’s the question Jim Cutter is
asking, and the answers he’s getting aren’t reassuring.
Albert Langley was a successful, well-respected criminal
lawyer, but was he so good at getting criminals off that
he was the victim of revenge—a debt his innocent family
also paid in blood? From the town’s criminally corrupt
mayor to the tragic suicide of a talented student a decade
before, Promise Falls has more than its share of secrets.
And Jim Cutter, failed artist turned landscaper, need look
no further than his own home and his wife Ellen’s past to
know that things aren’t always what they seem. But not
even Jim and Ellen are ready to know that their son was in
the Langley house the night the family was
murdered.
Suddenly the Cutters must face the
unthinkable: that a murderer isn’t just stalking too close
to home but is inside it already. For the Langleys weren’t
the first to die and they won’t be the last.