βThe night they killed our neighbors, we never heard a thing.β
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 weβre 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 isnβt 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 Langleysβ boy, Adam; but how well did they really know their neighbors?
Thatβs the question Jim Cutter is asking, and the answers heβs getting arenβt 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 revengeβa debt his innocent family also paid in blood? From the townβs 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 Ellenβs past to know that things arenβt 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 isnβt just stalking too close to home but is inside it already. For the Langleys werenβt the first to die and they wonβt be the last.