by Mark Edwards
First published 2014
Andrew Sumner thinks his luck has finally turned. He meets Charlie, and she is everything he wanted. The relationship moves fast and burns hot. Then small things start to go wrong. A possession vanishes from his apartment. A stranger seems to be tracking his movements. Andrew tells himself he is overthinking it. Then people close to him get hurt. A friend. Someone he loves. The incidents pile up and Andrew can no longer explain them away. He starts to look at Charlie differently. He replays conversations, reconsiders moments that felt romantic at the time. The woman who seemed like the answer to everything might be the source of everything going wrong. Mark Edwards, the number one bestselling author of The Magpies, builds the tension through ordinary details: a missing object, a face spotted twice, a coincidence that stops feeling like one. Andrew is not a detective. He is a man who let someone in and now has to decide whether his instincts are protecting him or destroying the best thing in his life. The answer, when it comes, is worse than he feared.
Genres: fiction, mystery, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, paranoid, psychological, suspenseful, tension-filled
Tropes: obsessive-love-interest, slow-burn-revelation, trust-betrayal, unreliable-narrator
Period: contemporary
348 pages · Paperback · Thomas & Mercer
Content warnings: emotional-abuse, gaslighting, toxic-relationship