“A dazzlingly clever murder mystery told backwards asking the question: why would this loving
wife murder her husband?”—Gillian McAllister New York Times bestselling author of Famous
Last Words and Wrong Place Wrong Time From the New York Times bestselling author of The
Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive utterly propulsive
murder-mystery in reverse tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its
heart. Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a
beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom
teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son Jason is all grown up. All is
well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband. What happens next has everything to do with
what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse moving
backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives—their fiftieth birthday
party buying their home Jason’s birth the mysterious death of a work colleague—all painting
a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.
Eventually we learn the details of what Thom and Wendy did in their early twenties a secret
that has kept them bound together through the length of their marriage. But its power over them
is fraying and each of them begins to wonder if they would be better off making sure their
spouse carries their secrets to the grave.
