โThe night they killed our neighbors, we never heard a thing.โ
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 weโre 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 isnโt 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 Langleysโ boy, Adam; but how well did they really know their neighbors?
Thatโs the question Jim Cutter is asking, and the answers heโs getting arenโt 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 revengeโa debt his innocent family also paid in blood? From the townโs 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 Ellenโs past to know that things arenโt 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 isnโt just stalking too close to home but is inside it already. For the Langleys werenโt the first to die and they wonโt be the last.