Secrets can scandalize . . . In a lovely suburban town just north of New York City, the gossip mill runs more efficiently than the commuter-train line. And in every impeccably decorated house, they're talking about Lauren Walsh. They say that nothing could be worse than being abandoned by your husband for another woman. They're wrong . . . Secrets can shock . . . All Lauren wants is to protect her children from the pain of her messy divorce. But when their father goes missing, a case of mistaken identity puts all their lives in danger, and a stealthy predator lurks in the shadows, watching . . . waiting . . . Secrets can kill . . . Lauren is about to uncover an unfathomable truth—a truth this cold-blooded mastermind would never let her live to tell . . .

Elsa Cavalon—petrified that the nightmare from fifteen years earlier is beginning all over again . . . Marin Quinn—hiding with her daughters in their concrete fortress, her storybook marriage over . . . Perfect strangers whose once-perfect lives were cruelly shattered, they're bound by a long-lost child, a fragile strand of newfound maternal hope—and mutual loneliness. Yet Elsa and Marin are never truly alone. Someone is always nearby, watching them and their children. Someone driven by vengeance and the simple poetry of nursery rhymes . . . Someone who must satisfy a dark need with innocent blood. And now time is running out for two mothers stalked by a cunning mastermind who wants to leave them . . . Scared to death

And so it begins . . . again. Survivors of a serial killer who invaded their childhood, Lucy Walsh and Jeremy Cavalon are married now, replacing nightmares of their terrifying past with joyful dreams of the upcoming birth of their first child. Fiercely determined to protect the fragile balance of their lives, Lucy doesn’t know that her new husband guards a deadly secret . . . or that an Act of God is about to unleash a vengeful fury. For shell-shocked Lucy and Jeremy, the horrible death of a loved one is a tragic accident. But for a shadowy predator, it’s the first step toward completing a deadly mission that was interrupted so long ago. Now, at last, the members of the Walsh and Cavalon families will pay for their sins, one by one . . .