THE COTTAGE

A suburban Connecticut teacher’s carefully curated life is shattered by a series of domestic invasions that increasingly seem connected to the estranged sister who’s returned to her home.

The same night that Kate Burke deflects her older sister Rebecca Wallace’s request to stay the summer in the cottage on Kate’s Westport property with the reminder that the terms of their grandfather’s will restrict Becca’s access to the off-season, Kate glimpses a pair of teenagers running from her yard. The intruders, it turns out, have cut down the swings in the backyard, taken a knife from Kate’s kitchen, and impaled it on the bedroom wall. Widowed by her husband Leif’s murder two years ago and feeling in acute need of protection for herself and her 12-year-old twins, Kate rents the cottage to Jack Guarnere, a conveniently returning relation of police chief James O’Neil’s wife—and then, when the twins’ regular babysitter has a sudden conflict, is in the awkward position of begging Becca to come east from Colorado, stay in Kate’s house, and help care for Max and Callie. Her reunion with Becca, whom she’d sent away after Leif’s death, goes as well as can be expected, but the violations of her privacy continue in the form of cryptic texts, a note on her car’s windshield, a rock thrown at her living room window, and a compromising photo shared with her school superintendent. No sooner has her high school classmate Eddie Sabrowski, Leif’s colleague and best friend on the police force, working independently of her father-in-law, former police chief Leo Burke, identified a suspect than things get worse. Much worse.

A virtuoso demonstration of how painful it is for a beleaguered heroine to suspect any of the people she trusts the most.