When his teenage daughter fails to return from her summer job at a local hotel, Tim Blake discovers that she never worked there and has gone missing, and the situation gets worse when his initial search results in a death threat.
Baffled when his non-drinking wife dies in a drunk-driving accident that she caused, Glen Garber struggles as a single father while trying to understand other disparities, which add up to a conspiracy involving virtually everyone he knows.
Fourteen-year-old Cynthia Bigge woke one morning to discover that her entire family-mother, father,brother-had vanished. No note, no trace, no return. Ever. Now, twenty-five years later, she'll learn the devastating truth. Sometimes it's better not to know. . . . Cynthia is happily married with a young daughter, a new family. But the story of her old family isn't over. A strange car in the neighborhood, untraceable phone calls, ominous "gifts"-someone has returned to her hometown to finish what was started twenty-five years ago. And no one's innocence is guaranteed, not even her own. By the time Cynthia discovers her killer's shocking identity, it will again be too late . . . even for goodbye.
Critically acclaimed and bestselling author Linwood Barclay brings terror closer than ever before in a stunning thriller in which murder strikes in the place we should feel safest of all.... In a quiet neighborhood, in the house next door, a family is brutally murdered for no apparent reason. You can't help thinking, It could have been us. And you start to wonder: What if we're next? Promise Falls isn't the kind of community where families are shot to death in their own homes. But how well did Jim and Ellen Cutter really know their neighbors--or the darker secrets of their small town? They don't have to look further than their own marriage to know that things aren't always what they seem. Now the Cutters and their son, Derek, must face the unthinkable: that a murderer isn't just stalking too close to home...but is inside it already.
