The Couple Next Door
Anne and Marco Conti leave their six-month-old daughter Cora asleep upstairs in her crib while they go next door for what should be a perfectly ordinary dinner party, taking the baby monitor with them and checking on her every half hour. When they return home, Cora is gone. As the investigation grinds forward and the tabloids gather on the lawn, the tidy image Anne and Marco have presented to their friends and to Anne's wealthy, disapproving parents starts to crack, revealing postpartum depression, financial panic, an affair, and older family secrets that point in increasingly ugly directions. Shari Lapena's debut is a brisk, propulsive domestic thriller whose suspicions move from neighbor to neighbor and spouse to spouse until almost no one in the house is beyond reasonable doubt.
Where The Couple Next Door keeps showing up
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Books in conversation with The Couple Next Door
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What you might want to know about The Couple Next Door
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Anne and Marco Conti go next door for dinner with the babysitter cancelled, taking a baby monitor and checking on their six-month-old in shifts. When they come home, the front door is open and Cora's crib is empty.
No. The Couple Next Door is a standalone Shari Lapena thriller. Lapena has written several other standalone domestic thrillers, including A Stranger in the House and The Conditional.
Yes, indirectly. The Channel 4 series The Couple Next Door (2023) shares the title but is unrelated to Shari Lapena's novel. A direct adaptation has been in development.
The Couple Next Door was written by Shari Lapena, published in 2016 by Pamela Dorman Books.
The Couple Next Door is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Couple Next Door takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Couple Next Door is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
