Behind the Lie
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Private investigator Laney Bird is in a fight to save lives—including her own—when an explosion of deadly violence exposes the crimes simmering beneath small-town suburbia.
A transplant to the upstate New York hamlet of Sylvan, all Laney wants is a quiet life for herself and her son. But things rarely remain calm in Laney’s life. When one neighbor, a Russian immigrant, is shot, and his Ukrainian wife disappears—along with Laney’s best friend—at her neighborhood summer block party, Laney will need all her skills as a PI to solve a mystery that reaches far beyond her small town.
As people closest to Laney fall under suspicion, the local authorities, and her colleagues, question her own complicity. And then there’s 15-year-old Alfie, her complicated, enigmatic son, obviously hiding something. Even as Laney struggles to bury evidence of her boy’s involvement, his cagey behavior rings every maternal alarm.
Laney’s personal life unravels as she’s drawn into her friend’s dark secrets, and she must ask herself: how far would a wife and mother go to keep her family from ruin? One woman’s desperation is another’s downfall, and with treachery blazing hot as the searing summer sun, Laney realizes she and Alfie are in danger and she must fight to save lives, her own and her son’s included.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Naymark's excellent sequel to 2021's Hide in Place, a block party turns violent in upstate Sylvan, N.Y., where PI Laney Bird, a former NYPD detective, and Alfie, her troubled 15-year-old son, resettled four years earlier. Toward the end of the festivities, Oliver Dubois, the husband of Laney's friend Holly, uses a neighbor's pickup truck to smash through the front door of his own home. When Laney hears fire engines, she rushes to a nearby burning house, where the truck's owner, Step Volkin, is inside bleeding from a gunshot wound. Both Step's wife, Vera, and Holly go missing, along with Laney's firearm. When Alfie, who has committed arson in the past, is evasive about his whereabouts at the time of the fire, Laney fears her son has crossed a line. She sets out to find the truth, uncertain whether to conceal or expose it. Naymark hits the rhythms of small-town life perfectly and maintains tension by alternating perspectives. Lisa Unger fans will want to take a look.
