This Neighborhood BBQ Ends in a Missing Baby

The Dinner Party Nobody Should Have Gone To

Here’s the setup, and it is a genuinely great one. Anne and Marco Conti go to a dinner party next door, at their neighbors’ house, and they bring the baby monitor instead of the baby, because their six month old daughter Cora is asleep upstairs and they check on her every half hour like responsible parents who also really want to drink wine and pretend they still have a marriage worth saving. Around 1am they go home. Cora is gone. Window open. No note, no obvious point of entry that makes sense, no ransom demand yet.

I want to be honest about something: the premise made me furious before it made me scared. Who leaves a baby alone in a house and checks on her by monitor from next door. But Lapena knows that’s the reaction, and she uses it. Every character in this book, including the detective running point on the case, judges Anne and Marco for exactly this decision, and that judgment becomes part of the plot instead of just background noise. The shame is a hook. It’s smart.

From there it’s a fairly classic missing child thriller structure, told in short chapters that alternate close third person between Anne, Marco, and eventually the detective, Rasbach, who I found more interesting than either of the parents for a solid third of the book. But Lapena isn’t interested in a straightforward kidnapping mystery. She wants you to distrust the marriage as much as you distrust whoever took the baby, and that’s where the book gets its claws in.

What Actually Works, and What Made Me Roll My Eyes

The pacing is the best thing here, full stop. Chapters end on tiny gut punches, information gets doled out in stingy little portions, and I read this in basically two sittings on a rainy weekend when I had a cold and no business finishing an entire novel while blowing my nose. That’s not nothing. A thriller that makes you forget you’re sick is doing its job.

The Anne and Marco marriage stuff is genuinely the strongest material in the book. Anne has a history of postpartum depression that the book handles with more care than I expected going in, and Marco’s financial desperation, the stuff with his business partner and the money he can’t admit is gone, gives the second act a real engine that isn’t just “who took the baby.” When Marco’s secrets start surfacing I actually gasped once, alone, in my apartment, which is embarrassing to admit but true.

Now the part where I have to be a grump. The back half of this book piles on twist after twist, and by twist number three or four I stopped trusting my own reactions because I could feel Lapena reaching for shock instead of earning it. There’s a reveal involving Anne’s father, Richard, and his wife Cynthia that works fine on its own, but stacked on top of everything else it starts to feel like the plot is a jenga tower where every new piece is just there to keep the last one from looking too thin. And the ending, without spoiling it, resolves in a way that lets at least one character off the hook a little too cleanly for what they did. I closed the book satisfied but also a little bit like I’d eaten a whole bag of chips in one sitting. Good in the moment, slightly gross after.

The prose is not going to win anyone over. It’s plain, functional, built entirely for momentum. If you need beautiful sentences this is not your book. I don’t think it’s trying to be.

Tangent: I picked this up originally because my sister in law, who does not read thrillers, texted me at midnight saying she couldn’t put it down, and I remember thinking that was suspicious, because she also once told me the movie Cats was “fine.” But she was right about this one. Word of mouth on domestic thrillers is a strange, powerful thing, and this book rode it hard when it came out.

The scariest thing about this book isn’t the missing baby. It’s how fast a marriage built on lies can look, from the outside, like a normal one.

About Shari Lapena

Shari Lapena was a lawyer, then an English teacher, then a novelist who published a couple of literary novels that didn’t make much noise, before she pivoted hard into domestic suspense and immediately became one of the most reliable machines in the genre. She writes fast, plotty, morally grubby thrillers about ordinary looking people (suburban couples, book clubs, dinner parties) hiding something rotten, and she’s put out close to a book a year since this one broke through. She’s Canadian, she’s disarmingly funny in interviews about how dark her plots get, and she has said plainly that she writes to entertain, not to win prizes. I respect that. Not every writer needs to be reaching for the literary canon, and Lapena knows exactly what shelf she’s on.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

The Couple Next Door scratches a very specific itch, and here’s where to go next.

• Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, for the same suburban rot with sharper character work and actual humor underneath the dread.
• The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn, if you want the unreliable narrator dialed up even further.
• An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, for another fast, twisty, slightly trashy weekend read.
• A Good Marriage by Kimberly McCreight, if the marriage-as-crime-scene angle was your favorite part.

For your book club

1. Did you judge Anne and Marco for leaving Cora home alone, and did that judgment change as you learned more about their marriage?
2. Which character earned the least sympathy from you by the end, and did the book want you to feel that way?
3. Do you think the twists in the second half were earned, or did the plot start working against itself?
4. How did the book use Anne’s postpartum depression, and did it feel handled with care or used mainly as a plot device?
5. Did the ending feel like justice, or did someone get away with something?