The End of Her
by Shari Lapena
Stephanie and Patrick are adjusting to life with their colicky twin babies. They’re both exhausted from lack of sleep, and Patrick’s work as an architect is suffering too. Then Erica—a woman from Patrick’s past—shows up at his office, ostensibly for a job interview with his partner. She pretends she hasn’t recognized Patrick, but the next day she messages him. She wants money, or she’ll tell Stephanie how his previous wife, Lindsay, died.
Stephanie knew that Lindsay died in an accident, but not how. Patrick now tells her about that day: he and Lindsay were going to drive to her parents’ place, but the car was buried in snow. Lindsay waited in the car while he dug them out; he hadn’t realized that snow was blocking the exhaust pipe. By the time he was finished clearing snow, she had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Erica still thinks she can force Patrick to pay her. She threatens to tell the authorities that she and Patrick were having an affair before Lindsay died—which would mean he had a motive to kill Lindsay. Meanwhile she hovers, ominously. At the park, she sits next to Stephanie—pretending she’s one of the local mommies—and admires the twins. She breaks into their house and steals Stephanie’s purse.
Tensions and doubts grow as the plot gets more and more complicated. As the blurb on the book cover says, “Is Erica the persuasive liar Patrick says she is? Or has Stephanie made a terrible mistake?”
And Erica has a couple of other prospects in mind for blackmail as well—other people whose secrets she threatens to reveal if they don’t pay up.
This book promises many twists, and does not disappoint, with several occurring right up to the final pages.
The End of Her is Shari Lapena’s fifth domestic thriller. Her first, The Couple Next Door, became a runaway success when it came out in 2016. Since then she’s published A Stranger in the House, An Unwanted Guest, and Someone We Know; all of them have appeared on numerous bestseller lists including those of the New York Times and the UK Sunday Times.
She was an avid reader since childhood, loving books by Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Daphne Du Maurier, and Patricia Highsmith among others. But becoming a writer didn’t seem a practical career choice; instead she worked as a lawyer and then as an English teacher. When she had her first child she became a stay-at-home mother, and—as many other women authors have done—she found a way to carve out writing time in between her family activities.
Her first novel, Things Go Flying, was published by a small Canadian press in 2007 (the year she turned 47) followed by Happiness Economics two years later. She describes these books as “literary comedies.” Both novels were well-received in Canada, nominated for literary awards, but had only modest sales and had no profile internationally.
That changed with her first suspense novel, The Couple Next Door. Lapena says she wrote it in secret, not telling anyone she was writing a thriller because she wasn’t sure she could do it. But when it was published in 2016, it flew to the top of bestseller lists including the New York Times list, and since then she’s written a new thriller every year. Her books have now sold in thirty-five territories around the world.
Lapena lives in Toronto with her husband Manuel and their two children. Recently they acquired, and are restoring, a Victorian farmhouse north of Cobourg, Ontario.
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