The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Woman in the Window returns with a
mesmerizing thriller ? part Knives Out part Agatha Christie . . . yet utterly unlike anything
you've ever read. ?I'll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.? So writes Sebastian Trapp
reclusive mystery novelist to his longtime correspondent Nicky Hunter an expert in detective
fiction. With mere months to live Trapp invites Nicky to his spectacular San Francisco mansion
to help draft his life story . . . living alongside his beautiful second wife Diana his
wayward nephew Freddy and his protective daughter Madeleine. Soon Nicky finds herself caught
in an irresistible case of real-life ?detective fever.? ?You and I might even solve an old
mystery or two.? Twenty years earlier?on New Year's Eve 1999?Sebastian's first wife and
teenaged son vanished from different locations never to be seen again. Did the perfect crime
writer commit the perfect crime? And why has he emerged from seclusion two decades later to
allow a stranger to dig into his past? ?Life is hard. After all it kills you.? As Nicky
attempts to weave together the strands of Sebastian's life she becomes obsessed with
discovering the truth . . . while Madeleine begins to question what her beloved father might
actually know about that long-ago night. And when a corpse appears in the family's koi pond
both women are shocked to find that the past isn't gone?it's just waiting.
