On a lovely June morning in a quiet Connecticut suburb, a maid carries breakfast to her mistress’s blue and ivory bedroom and discovers that the woman everyone adored lies strangled in her bed, a chiffon scarf knotted at her throat. Her husband is on a plane home from Chicago. Her closest friend is pouring a second cup of coffee a hedge away. Neither suspects how thoroughly their tidy world is about to come undone.
As a young detective from New York begins to assemble a portrait of the dead woman from those who loved her, the polished surfaces of the neighborhood crack open. A sensitive boy nurses a secret too large to carry. A teenage girl tells a desperate lie. A discarded first wife drinks alone in a shuttered house seventy-five miles away. Everyone adored her—and that, it turns out, is precisely the problem.
