Nightwatching
Fallon Book Club Pick (A Novel)
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4.0 • 23 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Unputdownable · Psychological Suspense · Horror · Tense · Gripping
A FALLON BOOK CLUB PICK
“Pulse-pounding locked-room suspense.” —Elle
“Nightwatching is like nothing I've read before. I wolfed it down in two sittings; it's amazing.”—Lisa Jewell
A footstep on the stairs. A second to react. What happens next will determine everything.
Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs.
She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender.
In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman must protect her family from a mysterious intruder in this heart-pounding thriller. Alone with her two small children during a blizzard, a young mother hears a noise that’s unusual even for her old, creaky house. As she rushes to hide with the kids in a secret room, a nightmare scenario unfolds. Debut author Tracy Sierra cleverly uses flashbacks to add depth and suspense to her deliberately simple plot. No one in the novel has a name, which both adds to the unnerving atmosphere and makes it easier to picture ourselves in this terrifying position. As Sierra’s heroine draws on all of her creativity and courage to escape the looming danger, the tension goes through the roof. Nightwatching starts out with a bang—and the hits just keep coming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
A must read!
Extraordinary. The plot was riveting, I couldn’t put the book down. I was totally drawn in, and emotionally invested from start to finish. This book would make an excellent movie.
It was so-so
This book started out fairly well but I soon lost interest and finished approx 70 pages before the end. I think it could have been about 100 pages shorter - there was too much waffling and inner-monologue.