The Couple Next Door

The Couple Next Door is a psychological thriller by the Canadian writer Shari Lapena, published in 2016. It was her first novel, and it takes a domestic arrangement that looks ordinary and dismantles it in a single evening.

Anne and Marco Conti seem to have everything: a loving relationship, a comfortable home and a baby daughter called Cora. One night they go next door for a dinner party, and while they are there a crime is committed in their own house, and the police immediately treat the parents as suspects.

Detective Rasbach is sure the panicked couple is hiding something, and he is right. As the account of what really happened inside the house comes out, Anne and Marco each discover that the other has been keeping secrets, some of them for years, and the novel keeps the reader ahead of one parent and behind the other as the story comes apart. Lapena tells it from several points of view, including the detective's, so that each of them knows something the others do not.