First published 2010
David Harwood takes his wife Jan and four-year-old son to an amusement park on a summer Saturday. What starts as family time becomes terror when someone vanishes without explanation. David works as a reporter for the Promise Falls Standard, a struggling newspaper in upstate New York. He has been investigating a development project scandal that could save his paper, but his editors keep killing the story. Now none of that matters. David launches his own search for answers about his missing family. Each clue he finds creates new questions. The investigation pulls him into a network of lies that reaches deeper than he imagined. David discovers that finding his family means confronting truths that will change everything he believed about his life in Promise Falls.
Genres: suspense, mystery, crime, contemporary
Vibes: fast-paced, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: missing-persons, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Promise Falls, New York
Period: 21st-century
421 pages · Paperback · Delacorte Press