First published 2001
Cal Weaver is a private investigator living in a small town in upstate New York. His teenage son is dead, the result of a tragic accident, and the loss has pushed Cal and his wife to opposite ends of their grief. Cal is stuck. One rainy night, a drenched teenage girl taps on his car window and asks for a ride. He knows better. He lets her in anyway. Something feels wrong almost immediately, but by the time Cal registers it, he is already tangled up in whatever she brought with her. What follows pulls him into a web of lies and cover-ups running through the town he thought he knew. Cal has to keep moving forward, not just to protect himself, but because the truth is the only thing that can get him out. And the deeper he digs, the more dangerous that truth becomes. At the center of everything is a man still raw from losing his son, trying to figure out whether his judgment is gone or whether the town itself is rotten.
Genres: suspense, mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, fast-paced, gritty, suspenseful
Tropes: moral-ambiguity, stranger-danger, unreliable-narrator, web-of-lies
Setting: upstate New York
Period: contemporary
504 pages · Paperback · Orion
Content warnings: death