



Ware divides the novel into alternating “before” and “after” chapters, with the narrative of Hannah’s college experience unfolding parallel to the events of her life nearly a decade later, when she’s married to Will and pregnant with their first child. When Hannah finds April dead one night just after she’s seen Neville coming down the stairs from their rooms, it’s her testimony that puts him in jail. It’s a good life except for the increasingly creepy interactions she has with John Neville, one of the porters.

Sharing a picturesque set of rooms with the flamboyant and beautiful April Clarke-Cliveden, she divides her time between rigorous studying and energetic socializing with Emily Lippmana, Ryan Coates, Hugh Bland, and Will de Chastaigne, with whom she shares an attraction even though he's April’s boyfriend. Hannah Jones arrives at Oxford hardly believing that she’s been accepted into this haven of learning and wealth. Ten years after having discovered her Oxford roommate’s dead body in front of the fireplace in their room, a young woman struggles with the realization that she may have helped send the wrong man to prison. More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. Someone is not who they seem someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. One client in particular worries her Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused she reports that she is Delilah. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, " You’ll never find her. One night, a young mother goes for a run. What should be a rare horror-a woman gone missing-becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
