Aidan Marlowe is a broken man. The love of his life, his wife Holly, dropped dead from a brain aneurism while at their kids’ school, and their twins, Maggie and Bo, were there to see it. Marlowe is trying to inch forward, get through the funeral and help his kids manage their grief. When he gets a moment alone at the funeral with the coffin, he tries to tell Holly the one secret he’d not been able to tell her in life, but the ping of a text message distracts him. And that’s when he sees the text about the lottery. He’d been playing the same lottery numbers for years, and they finally hit. In a heartbeat, he learned that he’d won thirty million dollars.
He found a city that spoke to him of safety, of prosperity, of security. It’s a place with good schools, where his kids can grow up without fear. It would be a fresh start, this big house in Bury, New Hampshire. Marlowe is working with a lawyer who knows what to do with lots of money, and she’s set up new bank accounts for him and trusts for the twins. He closed on the house and hired an interior designer to fill it with furniture.
And then he found the letter.
It was printed on plain white paper and left on the front porch. It’s written by someone nearby, or a group. It’s signed We Who Watch, and it talks about the fact that his wife died and he’d won the lottery. It would have been easy enough to figure out that his wife had died, but he stayed anonymous when he won the lottery. No one was supposed to know about that. So who could have written the letter?
Then Marlowe finds out that the house has a history. The man who had been living there disappeared suddenly, and no one knew where he was. His two grown daughters had also gone missing, along with a grandson. There had been an investigation, but the local police found nothing. And then Marlowe finds a safe room in the basement.
He has to admit that there is a dark feeling in the house. Could it be haunted? Or is it just the secrets that flow through the walls? Marlowe hires a security company to put up cameras, but it doesn’t seem to help. There is still that creepiness in the air. More letters show up, telling him that he can’t move his family away, vaguely threatening, from We Who Watch.
Marlowe has his dad come to stay with them for awhile, which is good for the kids. But Marlowe keeps splintering apart. He’s drinking a lot. He loses time. He can feel his anger building, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He wonders if he can protect his kids against the darkness in the house, against the people watching them, against the darkness growing in himself. He wants to give up. He wants to join his wife in the next life. But he still has two kids who are depending on him.
Will Marlowe be able to keep them safe in this house in Bury, New Hampshire, or will the darkness destroy them all?
Carter Wilson is back with The New Neighbor, a creepy thriller that will have you questioning your sanity as one man’s life unravels before him. The author of The Dead Husband delivers a story with a little psychology, a helping of supernatural, and more than a little danger in this domestic thriller. Wilson keeps readers guessing what is real and what is insanity while asking just how far one man would go to protect his family from evil.
I raced through The New Neighbor, trying to keep track of what I thought was really happening and what it could mean. There is a lot going on in this book, and it’s hard to know what’s real and what is not. As Marlow loses his hold on reality, it gets more challenging to see the truth, but the stakes kept going up, keeping me hooked in to the story, more and more desperate to find out what’s really happening. I thought this was a strong thriller, and I look forward to were Wilson takes us next.
Egalleys for The New Neighbor were provided by Poisoned Pen Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.
