That is, until a tour of the house reveals an object that Hen recognizes. All is going well the four of them seem to get along and have chemistry. After just moving into a new home, Hen and her husband Lloyd attend a dinner party at Matthew and Mira's house. The book mostly switches between the perspectives of Hen, her new neighbour Matthew, and Matthew's wife, Mira. And I was so deeply sucked into this one that I totally didn't see it coming. Instead, the book is at times a game of cat and mouse, at other times a psychological portrait of justice and abuse.

There's no whodunnit because we know almost immediately who did it. Speaking of thrills, Before She Knew Him is a thriller, not a mystery, if that distinction is important to you. Well, that bodes well for me because I found this quite thrilling! Some seasoned Swanson readers are saying Before She Knew Him wasn’t as compelling as his other books. And that this is the beginning of a horrifying nightmare she may not live to escape.'They had a secret, the two of them, and there was no better way to start a friendship than with a secret.' Then one night, when she comes face to face with Matthew in a dark parking lot, she realizes that he knows she's been watching him, that she's really on to him. Could her neighbor, Matthew, be a killer? Or is this the beginning of another psychotic episode like the one she suffered back in college, when she became so consumed with proving a fellow student guilty that she ended up hurting a classmate? The more Hen observes Matthew, the more she suspects he's planning something truly terrifying. Hen knows because she's long had a fascination with this unsolved murder-an obsession she doesn't talk about anymore, but can't fully shake either.

The sports trophy looks exactly like one that went missing from the home of a young man who was killed two years ago. But when they meet the neighbors next door, that calm begins to erode as she spots a familiar object displayed on the husband's office shelf. Finally, she's found some stability and peace. Hen (short for Henrietta) is an illustrator and works out of a studio nearby, and has found the right meds to control her bipolar disorder. Hen and her husband Lloyd have settled into a quiet life in a new house outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Catching a killer is dangerous-especially if he lives next door From the hugely talented author of The Kind Worth Killing comes an exquisitely chilling tale of a young suburban wife with a history of psychological instability whose fears about her new neighbor could lead them both to murder.

Before she knew him novel