“She’s standing in the kitchen, looking out the large back windows. She turns toward me—there’s a swing of thick, brown hair—and I see the confusion and then the sudden fear in her wide brown eyes. She has registered the situation, the danger.”

Shari Lapena’s novel opens with a graphic description of the murder of a young woman, later revealed to be Amanda Pierce, around which the novel’s mystery will revolve. Most of the novel employs a third-person omniscient point of view, but this scene (and one other toward the end) is a first-person account by the as-yet-unknown murderer; the use of this perspective conceals the perpetrator’s identity, appearance, age, and even gender. It also provides clues about the scene of the murder: a kitchen with two large “back windows,” probably in a house.

“She puts it down to his being sixteen. Sixteen-year-old boys are murder.”

Olivia Sharpe consoles herself with the thought that her son Raleigh’s laziness and immaturity may be part of a passing phase, that in a couple of years his “prefrontal cortex” will have fully developed and he will have better impulse control. The author’s sly joke is in the word “murder,” which looks ahead to the mystery’s resolution: the impulse killing of Amanda Pierce by another 16-year-old boy, Adam Newell. At this point in the story, Olivia’s turn of phrase also plants a suggestion that Raleigh may have some involvement in the opening murder, introducing him as a suspect.