**Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award
**
**In 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.
