First published 2013
The summer Reggie turns thirteen, a serial killer named Neptune starts leaving severed hands on the steps of the local police department. Five days after each hand appears, a body turns up somewhere in town. Then it's Vera's hand on those steps. Vera, Reggie's ex-model mother, with her rotating cast of boyfriends and her gin. Reggie waits five days. No body comes. Neptune disappears. Reggie leaves town and spends the next twenty-five years building a life with walls around it, working as an architect, keeping people at a careful distance. Then a homeless shelter calls. Vera is alive. Reggie goes back, and everything she buried comes with her: the strange loyalty she felt toward Tara, a goth classmate who held a dark power over her, and Charlie, the detective's son who was tangled up in that awful summer too. The old secrets did not stay buried. Neptune never stopped. Jennifer McMahon builds a mystery that moves between 1985 and the present, pressing on the question of what Reggie actually knows and what she has spent decades refusing to see.
Genres: mystery, horror, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, introspective, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: dark-past, dual-timeline, mystery-unraveling, unreliable-narrator
Setting: small town
Period: 1985, present day
422 pages · Paperback · William Morrow Paperbacks
Content warnings: death, murder, violence