Zusatztext Barclay knows how to put ordinary people into extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Readers will zip through it with delight. Publishers Weekly "Affecting and effective . . .[Barclay] hit the international best-seller lists last year with his first thriller! No Time for Goodbye. Too Close to Home shows him in even better form. Wall Street Journal A terrifically fast-paced suspense story. Washington Post A gripping read. Booklist Informationen zum Autor Linwood Barclay is a former columnist for the Toronto Star . He is the #1 internationally bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including The Accident, Never Look Away, Fear the Worst, Too Close to Home, and No Time for Goodbye . Multiple titles have been optioned for film. Klappentext Critically acclaimed and bestselling author Linwood Barclay brings terror closer than ever before in a stunning thriller in which murder strikes in the place we should feel safest of all. In a quiet neighborhood, in the house next door, a family is brutally murdered for no apparent reason. You can't help thinking, It could have been us. And you start to wonder: What if we're next? Promise Falls isn't the kind of community where families are shot to death in their own homes. But how well did Jim and Ellen Cutter really know their neighborsor the darker secrets of their small town? They don't have to look further than their own marriage to know that things aren't always what they seem. Now the Cutters and their son, Derek, must face the unthinkable: that a murderer isn't just stalking too close to homebut is inside it already. Chapter One The night they killed our neighbors, the Langleys, we never heard a thing. It was warm and humid that evening, so we'd closed all the windows and had the air conditioner cranked up as high as it would go. Even at that, we couldn't get the temperature in the house much below 76. This was late July, and we'd been suffering through a heat wave the last week, the thermometer hitting mid-90s pretty much every day, except for Wednesday, when it hit 100. Even some rain early in the week had failed to break it. It wasn't getting much below the mid-80s even after the sun went down. Normally, it being a Friday night, I might have stayed up a little later, even have been up when it happened, but I had to work Saturday. That rain had set me back with all the customers I do yard work for. So Ellen and I had packed it in pretty early, nine-thirty or so. Even if we'd been up, we'd probably have been watching TV, so it's pretty unlikely we'd have heard anything. It's not like the Langleys' place is right next door. It's the first house in off the highway along our shared driveway. Once you pass their place, it's still another fifty or sixty yards or so before you get to our house. You can't see our place from the highway. Homes out here on the outskirts of Promise Falls in upstate New York have some space between them. You can see the Langleys' house up the lane, through the trees, but we never heard their parties, and if the racket I make tuning up lawn mowers ever bothered them, they never said anything about it. I was up around six-thirty Saturday morning. Ellen, who didn't have to go into her job up at the college, stirred as I moved into a sitting position on the side of the bed. "Sleep in," I said. "You don't have to get up." I stood up, wandered down to the foot of the bed, saw that the book Ellen had been reading before she'd turned out the light had fallen to the floor. It was just one of a stack of books on her bedside table. You have to do a lot of reading when you organize a college literary festival. "It's okay," she mumbled resignedly, turning her face into the pillow and p...

Autorentext

Linwood Barclay is a former columnist for the Toronto Star. He is the #1 internationally bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including The Accident, Never Look Away, Fear the Worst, Too Close to Home, and No Time for Goodbye. Multiple titles have been optioned for film.

Klappentext

• Critically acclaimed and bestselling author Linwood Barclay *brings terror closer than ever before in a stunning thriller in which murder strikes in the place we should feel safest of all….

  In a quiet neighborhood, in the house next door, a family is brutally murdered for no apparent reason. You can’t help thinking, It could have been us. And you start to wonder: *What if we’re next?

  *Promise Falls isn’t the kind of community where families are shot to death in their own homes. But how well did Jim and Ellen Cutter really know their neighbors—or the darker secrets of their small town? They don’t have to look further than their own marriage to know that things aren’t always what they seem. Now the Cutters and their son, Derek, must face the unthinkable: that a murderer isn’t just stalking too close to home…but is inside it already.

  Leseprobe
  *Chapter One

  The night they killed our neighbors, the Langleys, we never heard a thing.

  It was warm and humid that evening, so we'd closed all the windows and had the air conditioner cranked up as high as it would go. Even at that, we couldn't get the temperature in the house much below 76. This was late July, and we'd been suffering through a heat wave the last week, the thermometer hitting mid-90s pretty much every day, except for Wednesday, when it hit 100. Even some rain early in the week had failed to break it. It wasn't getting much below the mid-80s even after the sun went down.

  Normally, it being a Friday night, I might have stayed up a little later, even have been up when it happened, but I had to work Saturday. That rain had set me back with all the customers I do yard work for. So Ellen and I had packed it in pretty early, nine-thirty or so. Even if we'd been up, we'd probably have been watching TV, so it's pretty unlikely we'd have heard anything.

  It's not like the Langleys' place is right next door. It's the first house in off the highway along our shared driveway. Once you pass their place, it's still another fifty or sixty yards or so before you get to our house. You can't see our place from the highway. Homes out here on the outskirts of Promise Falls in upstate New York have some space between them. You can see the Langleys' house up the lane, through the trees, but we never heard their parties, and if the racket I make tuning up lawn mowers ever bothered them, they never said anything about it.

  I was up around six-thirty Saturday morning. Ellen, who didn't have to go into her job up at the college, stirred as I moved into a sitting position on the side of the bed.

  "Sleep in," I said. "You don't have to get up." I stood up, wandered down to the foot of the bed, saw that the book Ellen had been reading before she'd turned out the light had fallen to the floor. It was just one of a stack of books on her bedside table. You have to do a lot of reading when you organize a college literary festival.

  "It's okay," she mumbled resignedly, turning her face into the pillow and pulling the covers tighter. "I'll put some coffee on. You're just going to wake me up getting dressed anyway."

  "Well," I said, "if you're already getting up, some eggs would be nice." Ellen said something into the pillow I couldn't hear, but it didn't sound friendly. I continued, "If I heard you correctly, that it's no trouble, does that mean you could fry up some bacon, too?"

  She turned her head. "Is there a union for slaves? I want to sign up."

  I got up and walked to the window, flipped open the blinds to let the early morning sun in.

  "Oh God, make it go away," Ellen said. "Jesus, Jim, shut those."

  "Looks like another hot one," I said, leaving the blinds open. "I was kind of hoping it might rain, then I'd have an excuse not to work today."
  …