Put yourself in her place. She's the young mother of two small children. Their house is huge and old and there is a blizzard, but she knows the sounds she is hearing have nothing to do with the storm. There is someone in the home who shouldn't be there. What would you do? She is a small woman who understands she would lose in a face-to-face confrontation. There is only one course of action. She hides herself and the children in a space hidden behind a wall while the intruder searches for them. Knowing they can't stay there long, she devises a way to get help. But it costs her dearly. While NIGHTWATCHING, a novel by Tracy Sierra, is about a home invasion that is not just the quest for material valuables, it is about much, much more. While we are not told the protagonist's name, we learn about her when the narrative moves to her past. Is there enough in her past to give her the strength needed to protect herself and her children? Tension and fear are palpable from the very beginning. Skillfully, the author gives readers a front-row seat to an unimaginable scenario and brings forth a memorable protagonist. There is a small group of secondary characters. Readers are not likely to soon forget them, either. NIGHTWATCHING is just as much a psychological thriller as it is a horror story. Powerful and absorbing, it was not easy to put this book down until I finished it. In my opinion, that is the mark of an excellent story. Highly recommended.
“Nightmarish—you won’t be able to look away.” —Shari Lapena, New York Times bestselling author of The Couple Next Door
A razor-sharp thriller about a mother forced to the breaking point when her life and the lives of her children are threatened by an intruder
Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs.
Shrouded in the shadows, she sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender.
In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan, to search for any opportunity to find a weapon or escape and get help. But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.
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