Modern & contemporary fiction

Lila Emerson is fascinated by other people’s lives. As a house-sitter she loves looking after the glamorous, sophisticated homes she could never afford herself. And as a writer she enjoys watching the world go by, dreaming up stories for the people she sees from her window. But then she witnesses something only too real – the brutal and shocking murder of a young woman living across the street in New York. Now, because of what she saw, her own life is in immediate danger from an audacious, single-minded assassin who kills for profit and for pleasure. With the police following a false lead, she is on her own. Her only hope is to team up with Ashley Archer, an artist with his own complicated reasons for getting involved.

Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee; a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue – in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the centre of every party. But Lydia is under pressures that have nothing to do with growing up in 1970s small town Ohio. When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt and sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage.