Bestselling author Joël Dicker at his best – as intense, atmospheric, and gripping as Harry Quebert. It is July 30, 1994, in Orphea, a warm summer evening on the American East Coast: on this day, the resort town is shaken by a terrible crime, as the mayor, his family, and a random passerby are killed in a multiple homicide. Two young police officers, Jesse Rosenberg and Derek Scott, are assigned to the investigation, and they approach their work with the utmost care until a suspect is found. However, twenty years later, journalist Stephanie Mailer claims that Rosenberg and Scott were mistaken. Shortly thereafter, the young woman disappears. The idyllic Hamptons become the setting for a fatal intrigue that Joël Dicker unfolds with a unique sense of pace and narrative sophistication.