The Couple Next Door

“Who goes to a dinner party next door and leaves her baby alone in the house? What kind of mother does such a thing? She feels the familiar agony set in—she is not a good mother.”

In the opening chapter, the novel introduces Anne as struggling with guilt over her parenting decisions. In this self-lacerating indictment, hours before her baby will turn up missing, Anne is already embracing guilt and shame. The assessment, driven at this point driven more by postpartum depression than anything she has actually done, reflects how vulnerable Anne will be when her baby turns up missing.

“This leaving the monitor on, checking every half hour while they dined next door, the disabled motion detector, the open front door, it could all simply be an elaborate fiction, a carefully constructed fabrication of the parents, to provide them with an alibi, to throw authorities off the scent.”

Detective Rasbach introduces honesty into a novel filled with pretense. Early on, he sees the evidence of the kidnapping and understands that this could not be a random act. Within the genre of the police procedural, this passage aligns the reader with the detective and introduces the disturbing possibility that the parents might be responsible for the kidnapping.

“She climbed on, and they roared away, manicured gravel spitting up in their wake. That was the moment she’d decided she was in love.”

Anne’s marriage to the charismatic Marco upsets her straight-laced, conservative parents. Marco becomes another manifestation of her self-loathing—her love for him is based in her frustration with the world she grew up in.