Terry Painter enjoys her quiet life in tranquil Delray, Florida, where the single, forty-year-old nurse lives alone in the house she inherited from her mother. When young, vibrant Alison Simms rents the cottage on her property, the two women strike up a fast friendship—and Terry is swept into a fantastic new life: dinners out, shopping, makeovers, even flirting with the handsome son of one of her elderly patients. But nothing about her newfound companion is as it appears, as Terry discovers when Alison’s closely guarded past comes to light. Now Terry is locked into a race to reclaim her own life—before she opens the door any further to the stranger she thought she knew . . . How much does she know about her, really? Alison has some strange habits and stranger friends. She has a limitless supply of cash in her purse, and knows the house so well it’s as if she’s been in it before. Her reasons for coming to Delray don’t quite add up, and she won’t talk about her parents: “We weren’t on the best of terms.” Moreover, Terry notices a shadowy figure lurking around her house, and starts to receive disturbing phone calls. Snippets of overheard conversation, surreptitious glances in Alison’s diary, and her mother’s nagging voice in her head make Terry paranoid that her tenant may want to do her harm. Should Terry have been more suspicious, or at least wary, especially after the experience with her last tenant? And yet, as Alison says of the neighbour’s pet dogs, “How could anything that sweet be destructive?” And who is hiding more, Alison -- or Terry? Diving deeply into the psyches of her most captivating characters to date, Joy Fielding has created a riveting tale that challenges our most basic assumptions regarding love, friendship, and obsession. It leaves the reader guessing at where the truth really lies until the final shocking twist that Publishers Weekly has called “an ending worthy of Hitchcock”. Fielding delivers an intelligent, tight plot full of psychological complexity, without sacrificing the simple prose and page-turning suspense she is known for around the world.