Book of Knives — Lise Haines

"Beautifully written and endlessly absorbing, this is a novel to read with the covers up around your chin and a candle burning." -- Sarah Taylor Stewart, author of the Maggie D'arcy mysteries

When Nora agrees to help her new husband, Paul, and his family fix up Hidden Lake Camp, she didn't expect it to be in such a state of ruin. The dock full of rotten boards, smashed windows, cabins falling apart -- it's all a past he'd just as soon bury. Only a few months, he said. They'd drive north to get Paul's elderly parents settled while he and his brother make enough repairs to sell the property.

The summer camp, however, and its deep lake have other plans.

On the first night, Nora stumbles through a first meal with his difficult family. Her sister-in-law shows off a prized collection of handmade knives, thirteen in all. Long summer days stretch before them and one by one the knives begin to disappear.

By the time the fourth and fifth vanish from behind locked doors and out from under watchful eyes, Nora can barely sleep. There's talk of ghosts, secret rooms and someone at the summer camp found dead in the tall grass.

Unsettling, gripping, and totally original, Book of Knives is a literary thriller that shows how one person's unraveling can bring the whole house down.

"Seen through the perceptive eyes of complex characters, a series of vivid scenes unfolds. One finds all one's worst fears echoed here in an increasingly suspenseful and surprising crescendo of events."  -- Sheila Kohler, author of the literary thriller Open Secrets, one of Vogue's best books of 2020