The couple next door shari lapena book

The Couple Next Door: A Novel - Softcover

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright � 2016 Shari Lapena

One

Anne can feel the acid churning in her stomach and creeping up her throat; her head is swimming. She's had too much to drink. Cynthia has been topping her up all night. Anne had meant to keep herself to a limit, but she'd let things slide-she didn't know how else she was supposed to get through the evening. Now she has no idea how much wine she's drunk over the course of this interminable dinner party. She'll have to pump and dump her breast milk in the morning.

Anne wilts in the heat of the summer night and watches her hostess with narrowed eyes. Cynthia is flirting openly with Anne's husband, Marco. Why does Anne put up with it? Why does Cynthia's husband, Graham, allow it? Anne is angry but powerless; she doesn't know how to put a stop to it without looking pathetic and ridiculous. They are all a little tanked. So she ignores it, quietly seething, and sips at the chilled wine. Anne wasn't brought up to create a scene, isn't one to draw attention to herself.

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30 May Book Review: “The Couple Next Door” by Shari Lapena

Posted at 10:58h in Psychological thriller by Clare3 Comments

I picked up “The Couple Next Door” because sometimes you just need a twisty thriller to get your heart racing. I read it mostly in the evenings after work, when I needed something to distract me from the daily grind. I had high hopes for this one, given all the buzz about its shocking twists and turns.

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What’s it about?

“The Couple Next Door” kicks off with a young couple, Anne and Marco Conti, heading to a dinner party next door, leaving their six-month-old daughter, Cora, alone at home. They’ve got the baby monitor with them and check on her every half hour, but their worst nightmare comes true when they return to find Cora missing. Panic ensues, and the police, led by Detective Rasbach, get involved.

As the investigation unfolds, we learn that Anne has been struggling with postpartum depression, and Marco is in financial hot water. The couple’s story comes under scrutiny, with the media portraying them as negligent parents. Relationships with their neighbors, especial

Interview with Shari Lapena, Author of The Couple Next Door

One summer night, Anne and Marco Conti’s new baby, Cora, mysteriously disappears from her crib while her parents carouse at a dinner party next door. What starts out as every parent’s worst nightmare leads to growing scrutiny from the police, the couple’s mounting desperation, and eventually, suspicion within the family’s inner circle. What really happened to baby Cora? The Couple Next Door is a taut, psychological thriller that sweeps you from your feet and doesn’t let you go. Book Club Babble is pleased to interview its author Shari Lapena.

Kate Newton: First off let me say I can’t remember reading a book as fast as I did this one. I finished it in three days, which is a testament to how it grabs the reader and doesn’t let go! Can you tell us how you first got the idea for The Couple Next Door?

Shari Lapena: I was trying to come up with an idea for a thriller, and I knew I wanted it to be close to home. I’m not one to research spies and so on. One day the idea just popped into my head—what if a babysitter cancelled and left a couple in the lurch at the last minute? What would they do? Would they lea

Shari Lapena

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Inside the Success of ‘The Couple Next Door’

When Pamela Dorman acquired Shari Lapena’s thriller The Couple Next Door in the fall of 2015, there were strikes against the novel. While Dorman loved the book, a twisty tale about a couple whose baby goes missing from their upstate New York home, it was part of an incredibly crowded subgenre of psychological suspense novels vying to capture the readers of megahits Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. The novel’s Canadian author was also an unknown quantity in the U.S. (where the book would serve as her debut).

Now The Couple Next Door has become a main stay on the bestseller list, having sold more than 500,000 copies across all formats. The team at Viking, where Dorman’s eponymous imprint is housed, said the novel, released in hardcover in August 2016, was helped along by the things that, in industry parlance, make up a book’s “package”—namely its title, jacket, and cover copy.

The jacket, which went through nearly 50 iterations, initially featured two people, since the book’s title refers to a couple. The final version, which shows the silh