September 1, 2023
One night, hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs, a mother hustles her children into a secret room in the oldest part of the house, hidden behind a wall. As the intruder hunts for them, trying to entice the children with sweet promises, she recognizes who he is and, as the survivor of a crime no one acknowledges, the gravity of the danger she faces. Preempted by Scott Free Productions, Ridley Scott's company. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from January 8, 2024
At the start of attorney Sierra’s outstanding debut, an unnamed mother huddles inside a tiny, secret room in her family’s isolated New England home with her eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son, the latter of whom she struggles to keep quiet so the monstrous intruder searching the house won’t find them. Just when the tension becomes almost unbearable, Sierra flashes back to happier times with the protagonist’s now-absent husband, and further still to her childhood marked by the untimely death of her mother. As the story unspools, each of these narrative strands sheds light on the others, and it gradually becomes clear who might be stalking through the narrator’s house—and why she’s hesitant to call the police. As grippingly suspenseful as the plot is, Sierra’s first outing boasts other strengths just as noteworthy, from its transportingly eerie setting to its indelible main character, a petite, prototypical “good girl” pushed to the brink by years of being underestimated, patronized, and disbelieved by men with power. The icing on the cake is the splendid ending, which feels both surprising and inevitable, shifting perceptions of nearly everything that came before without landing like a gimmick. Readers will be eager to see what Sierra does next. Agent: Helen Heller, Helen Heller Agency.
Starred review from December 15, 2023
As a blizzard rages outside, a woman and her young children try to elude a home invader. It's midnight, and a mother has just gotten her frightened 5-year-old son back to sleep when she hears an unexpected "wheeze of weight" on the stairs. She sees a tall stranger slink onto the landing. He's wearing plastic gloves and his grinning face is uncovered, indicating he doesn't intend to leave evidence or witnesses, and his sneakers are dry despite the storm, suggesting he's planned ahead and expects to stay a while. He misses her watching from the shadows, instead making a beeline for the 1722 New England colonial's modern addition, but that also means he now separates her from her phone, computer, car, and gun. Few options remain, so she scoops up her son, rouses and hushes her 8-year-old daughter, and creeps downstairs. Long ago, someone walled in their beehive oven's "messy flues," leaving an empty space accessible via a hidden panel. The trio slips inside, hoping the intruder will get frustrated and flee, but he makes himself comfortable and starts trying to break them. With school preemptively canceled and the nearest neighbors half a mile away through feet of snow, nobody can save them but her. Straddling the line between psychological thriller and domestic horror, Sierra's auspicious debut immediately plunges readers headlong into its unnamed protagonist's waking nightmare. The tense, emotionally resonant close-third-person narrative intercuts the man's relentless assault with the woman's own self-recriminations, imagined in her absent husband's hypercritical voice. Well-timed flashbacks add context and poignancy. Fiercely feminist and viscerally terrifying.
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January 1, 2024
Late one night, alone in the middle of a blizzard with her two young children, a mother realizes that there is an intruder in the house. She acts quickly, whisking her little ones to a tiny secret room hidden behind a panel in their old farmhouse. In the claustrophobic darkness, she is taunted and terrorized by the intruder, who stalks through the house for hours, systematically searching for them. Worse, she gradually recognizes his voice, and with it, the chilling knowledge of what he wants. What she doesn't know is that her nightmare is just beginning, as the aftermath of the incident sees every decision she made called into question. Frequent flashbacks provide readers with just enough context to gradually puzzle everything out as the story races to a surprising, satisfying conclusion. A keenly suspenseful first novel, made even more compelling by what it has to say about the way women are often misjudged and treated unfairly in matters of marriage, family life, and mental health.
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