A brilliantly twisting psychological thriller by the author of Before We Met..
How far would you go to protect the people you love?
When the brilliant young painter Marianne Glass is found dead in her snow-covered Oxford garden, Rowan Winter, once her closest friend, knows it wasn't an accident. Marianne had paralysing vertigo: she would never have gone close enough to the roof-edge to fall.
Meeting the Glass family - large-hearted feminist Jacqueline; relationship-guru Seb, and Marianne's kind, academic brother Adam - had been life-changing for the teenage Rowan, the only child of a much-absent widower. The Glasses had opened a WC window on a life of ideas and possibility, and in Jacqueline, Rowan had found the encouragement and warmth that, with no mother of her own, she had longed for since childhood. Though she and Marianne haven't spoken for ten years, she knows she has to find out what really happened.
Her pursuit of the truth takes her into every corner of her old friend's life, from Bohemian east London to the professional art world in which Marianne had made her name. Many people are grieving, including her gallerist and boyfriend, James Court, and Peter Turk, the singer with a one-hit-wonder band who had yearned for Marianne in vain for more than a decade. There's also the American portrait painter with at least one dead woman in his past.
The deeper she goes, the more convinced Rowan becomes that something is very wrong. Is someone breaking in to Marianne's house? Who is the man who stands at the window opposite and watches at night? Rowan is determined to find out - but some secrets might be better left uncovered, and others can be lethal...
