First published 2019
On Monday morning, four people step into an elevator in a Manhattan office tower. They press their floor buttons. The car ignores them, rides straight to the top, pauses, then drops to the bottom of the shaft. Everyone inside dies. Tuesday brings another plunge in a different skyscraper. Wednesday, another. Three days, three buildings, a city that runs on vertical transportation suddenly paralyzed with fear. Thousands of workers refuse to leave their apartments. Commerce stalls. Emergency calls to high floors go unanswered. Detectives Lois Delgado and Jerry Bourque work the case alongside journalist Kaylee Sommers, chasing a thread that connects the sabotage to a fingerless body found on the High Line. Someone engineered this terror precisely and patiently, and they are not finished. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the city's newest and tallest residential tower is scheduled for Friday night. The investigators have four days to find the person responsible before the next car falls. Linwood Barclay builds the pressure floor by floor until the whole structure comes down.
Genres: fiction, mystery, crime, thriller
Vibes: dark, fast-paced, high-stakes, suspenseful, tense
Tropes: escalating-threat, multiple-perspectives, race-against-time
Setting: Manhattan, New York, High Line
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
464 pages · Paperback · Doubleday Canada
Content warnings: death, murder, violence