The Couple Next Door, by Shari Lapena

The neighbors invite you to dinner. The typical fellowship dinner for newcomers to the neighborhood. You and your partner hesitate to go. You have run out of the usual babysitter and you have no one to turn to.

It occurs to you that being a dinner in the house next door ..., you could well go with the electronic monitor and make a round of the house every little while.

Marco ended up convincing Anne and they did. At the end of the evening, when they return home, the girl is not there.

In addition to the corresponding panic, the feeling of guilt emerges. From Marco for convincing Anne, from Anne for succumbing to Marco's idea, from the neighbor for asking them not to go with the baby, from Anne for feeling those feelings of detachment for her newborn daughter ...

But panic overwhelms everything. The only objective is to find the girl. Knowing what happened, putting aside that fateful feeling about a possible and macabre ending for a little person like her.

The intensity of this thriller lies in all these nuances. To which we are adding the need to know what happens among so many shadows that are spread over all the characters.

In a way there are predictable aspects. But it seems more like a pretense engineered by Shari Lapena so that you trust yourself as a reader and succumb to a greater degree to the final impact, to the twist that arises from the evidence revealed in the middle of the book.

A choral crime novel, where those shadows of the characters lead us to their pasts, to their possible motivations, to the ultimate truth of their souls. Psychology of singular characters with whom to empathize in order to understand the rugged and macabre of the girl's disappearance.

The police will look for clues here and there. And I repeat that you will be able to check how the resolution of the case is seen to arrive. But don't trust yourself, you have a lot to know and discover in this story ...

You can now buy The Couple Next Door, the latest book by Shari Lapena, here: