From Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street, comes another mind-bending and cleverly crafted tale about the stories that shape us, and how easily they can escape us.
In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of a sun-drenched summer of his youth and of the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the terrible tragedy that forever bonded him with his friends Nat and Harper in unknowable ways. Of a horror that has followed them over the years.
Wilder has returned to the town decades later in an attempt to recount that summer's events in his memoirs. But as he writes, Wilder begins to fear his grip on the truth is fading, and events in the manuscript start to chime eerily with the present. He's even started seeing a dark-haired woman down in the icy waters below the cottage, but nobody else can.
No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does...
Narrator Christopher Ragland delivers the majority of what begins as a pleasant coming-of-age story of three teens that turns into a complex psychological horror story-within-a-story, within-a-story. Ragland excels at portraying Wilder, skillfully conveying his fears, vulnerabilities, and victimhood. However, Ragland's Maine accent for Nate, and his female British voice for the third character in
