Description

Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark AwardIn the tradition of Daphne du Maurier, Shari Lapena, and Michelle Richmond comes a new thriller from the bestselling author of The Lake of Dead Languages-a twisty, harrowing story set at a prestigious prep school in which one woman s carefully hidden past might destroy her future.Tess has worked hard to keep her past buried, where it belongs. Now she s the wife to a respected professor at an elite boarding school, where she also teaches. Her seventeen-year-old son, Rudy, whose dark moods and complicated behavior she s long worried about, seems to be thriving: he has a lead role in the school play and a smart and ambitious girlfriend. Tess tries not to think about the mistakes she made eighteen years ago, and mostly, she succeeds. And then one more morning she gets a text at 2:50 AM: it s Rudy, asking for help. When Tess picks him up she finds him drenched and shivering, with a dark stain on his sweatshirt. Four hours later, Tess gets a phone call from the Haywood school headmistress: Lila Zeller, Rudy s girlfriend, has been found dead on the beach, not far from where Tess found Rudy just hours before. As the investigation into Lila s death escalates, Tess finds her family attacked on all sides. What first seemed like a tragic accidental death is turning into something far more sinister, and not only is Tess s son a suspect but her husband is a person of interest too. But Lila s death isn t the first blemish on Haywood s record, and the more Tess learns about Haywood s fabled history, the more she realizes that not all skeletons will stay safely locked in the closet.