Why You'll Love This
A baby disappears while her parents dine twenty feet away — and every person in this story is hiding something.
- Great if you want: domestic suspense where no one is who they seem
- The experience: fast, claustrophobic, and relentlessly twisty
- The writing: Lapena withholds just enough — short chapters that keep flipping your suspicions
- Skip if: you find coincidence-heavy plots hard to forgive
About This Book
Every parent's deepest fear lives at the heart of this novel: you look away for a moment, and everything unravels. Anne and Marco leave their infant daughter sleeping next door while they attend a dinner party, checking the baby monitor, taking turns stepping out — doing everything right, more or less. Then they come home to an empty crib. What follows isn't just a missing-child investigation; it's a slow, suffocating excavation of a marriage, a neighborhood, and the secrets people keep even from themselves. Lapena doesn't just ask who took the baby — she asks what each character is truly capable of, and the answer is deeply unsettling.
What makes this book work is its ruthless efficiency. Lapena writes in short, punchy chapters that create a relentless forward pull, and she withholds information with surgical precision — never cheap, always purposeful. The close third-person perspective shifts between characters just enough to keep the reader perpetually off-balance, trusting no one. The suburban setting feels deliberately ordinary, which makes the darkness underneath it all the more effective. It's a tightly constructed puzzle that rewards attentive reading.
