When I get the keys to Forest Farm, my boyfriend Charlie’s family home, I know I am the luckiest girl alive. This gorgeous five-bed farmhouse with its sweeping gravel drive has been given to us no questions asked. And with Charlie’s parents living so close, I feel like the door has been shut on the secrets of my past and I’ve been welcomed into a brand-new family.

Imagine it’s legal to commit one murder in your lifetime—if you Register the victim and accomplish the kill within fourteen days. So when Lynell Mize stands in line to Register the man who abused her as a child, she’s shocked to hear a stranger Register her to be killed. Why would anyone who doesn't know her squander his one legal murder on her? Desperate to survive the next two weeks, she must find out who wants to kill her—and why.

When criminal lawyer Justine Stone is handed the lead on her first murder case, she’s thrilled at the chance to enter the big leagues—until she discovers that she recognizes the man on the stand. Jake Reynolds, her first love who abruptly disappeared from her life years ago, and who is now facing charges for a grisly double homicide. If she’s going to send Jake to prison for murder, she has to be sure, and that means heading back to their hometown to seek answers, a place she’s been desperate to leave in the past.

Residents of the posh Upstate New York neighborhood of Deer Crossing enjoy all the amenities wealth provides. From drive-up dog-grooming to monthly botox parties, these lucky suburbanites have everything they could ever want. And one thing they don’t. Stalker Caroline Case, who wheels her infant along their streets each night with just one goal … to spy on anyone too careless or too foolish to close their window blinds.

Today is Sophie Matthews’s sixteenth birthday party, an exclusive black-tie bash in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, where secrets are as deep-rooted as the sprawling live oaks. Sophie's dad has spared no expense, and his renovated cliffside mansion—once thought haunted and shuttered for years from outsiders—is now open for the event of the season. Then, just before the candles on the three-tiered cake are blown out, a body falls from the balcony onto the starlit dance floor below.