New Year’s Eve, 2023. When Hannah and her friends rent a luxury yacht in an Italian marina, they party in style under the stars until they pass out. The next morning, they are horrified to find they have been cut adrift into the open ocean, with no sight of land and no fuel in the engine. And that’s when the first person goes missing.

On Sunday, February 3rd 1990, seven-year-old Danny Redpath disappeared from his home. Four months later, his body was found in the nearby forest, washed clean of all evidence. Over time, more bodies were discovered; more families devastated forever. Apprehended while attempting to abduct another child, Jonathan Egan-Walsh was charged with the murders of thirteen boys. Convicted on all counts, he received life in prison and went unrepentant, still refusing to reveal the whereabouts of one of his victims, Zachery Marshall.

At her surprise 40th-birthday party, Kate Granger feels like the luckiest woman in the world but just hours later her fifteen-year-old daughter, Caily, is found unconscious underneath a bridge when she should have been at school. Now, Caily lies comatose in her hospital bed, and the police don’t believe it was an accident. As the investigation progresses, it soon becomes clear that not everyone in the family was where they claimed to be at the time of her fall. Caily should be safe in hospital but not everyone wants her to wake up.

I stand in the mortuary and take a deep breath before identifying the body of the man I’ve been married to for 26 years. Victor and I built Serenity Falls, a successful couples’ retreat, together. Honesty and trust were the bedrocks of our marriage, and we helped other couples repair their relationships too.

When Rose’s old friend Elise suddenly arrives on her doorstep having just escaped a controlling marriage, she offers her a place to stay. But Elise wants more than a safe refuge, she wants Rose to help her get her daughter back, so that she can truly start afresh with five-year-old Daisy safely in her arms. Every little girl needs her mother, after all. Ready to insert herself into Elise’s old home, Rose gets a job as a teacher, home-schooling Daisy. But when Rose is asked to take the little girl and bring her to Elise, she gets cold feet. Elise’s behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic.

Kat Grant and Alice Campbell have a friendship forged in shared confidences and long lunches lubricated by expensive wine. Though they're very different women - the artsy socialite and the struggling suburbanite - they're each other's rocks. But even rocks crumble under pressure. Like when Kat's financier husband, Howard, plunges to his death from the second-floor balcony of their South Florida mansion. Howard was a jerk, a drunk, a bully, and, police say, a murder victim. The questions begin piling up.

Two years ago, Sarah’s husband was jailed for her murder; her body was never found. Now, her grieving mother, Claire, spends her sleepless nights running a helpline for vulnerable women. Claire takes many calls, but one caller isn’t like the rest. She isn’t calling for help – she’s calling because she claims to know what happened to Sarah. But when Claire hears the terrifying news that her daughter’s killer has escaped from prison, she realises her nightmare is far from over – and her family are in danger yet again.

Grace Holloway keeps to herself. Since narrowly escaping death at the hands of the man who kidnapped her, she’s thrown herself into the small inn she runs in Rock Harbor, Maine. It’s quiet, quaint and, in the off-season, completely isolated—the perfect place for Grace to keep her own secrets. But Grace isn’t the only one with something to hide, and Rock Harbor isn’t just a sleepy vacation town. Someone is taking young women—girls who look an awful lot like Grace did when she was kidnapped so many years ago.

Of course, I’m not going to murder her in the night. I need my laptop back first. That’s the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the hugely successful novel Diary of an Octopus. So I could get into her apartment and take back what’s mine. Emily doesn’t know who I really am. She thinks I’m her biggest fan, her new best friend who happens to need a place to stay for a few days. She doesn’t realize the laptop she found—and took—from a busy airport almost two years ago was mine. I don’t care about the laptop, just what's on it: my diary.

Kirsten and Nick are enjoying a weekend away until, on their drive home, they accidentally run over and kill a man. They should call for help – but they have too much to lose, and no one can know the real reason they’re here. Instead, they make a split-second decision to conceal the accident. Amy and Greg have just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. Amy is expecting a baby, and they couldn’t be happier. So when Greg fails to come home from a dog walk one weekend, Amy knows the police are wrong to believe he left of his own accord.

A group of strangers arrive on a beautiful but remote island, ready for the challenge of a lifetime: to live there for one year, without contact with the outside world. But 12 months later, on the day when the boat is due to return for them, no one arrives. Eight people stepped foot on the island. How many will make it off alive?

Across Europe, a young woman with no name and no fixed appearance hops from empty villa to vacated apartment to dormant summer house under the guise of house sitter. Her agenda? Steal from the rich, and kill anyone who gets in her way. On a stormy night in England, travelling home down narrow country lanes, a fatal car crash leaves Kat’s husband Oliver dead. But as Kat begins to mourn his loss, she discovers something that suggests she never knew her husband at all.

French Alps, 1998. Two young men ski into a blizzard...but only one returns. Twenty years later. Four people connected to the missing man find themselves in that same resort. Each has a secret. Two may have blood on their hands. One is a killer-in-waiting. Someone knows what really happened that day. And somebody will pay. 

From the outside, it seems Grace has it all. Only she knows about the cracks in her picture-perfect life...and the huge secret behind them. After all, who can she trust? Her brother, Josh, is thousands of miles away, and he and Grace have never been close—he was always their parents’ favourite. Her best friend, Coco, walked away from her years ago; their friendship irreparably fractured by the choices they’ve made. And her husband, Marcus, seems like a different man lately. Grace can’t shake the feeling that he’s hiding something.

All marriages have their challenges, right? But as I watch my husband being put into the back of a cop car, I find myself wondering if I ever knew him at all. Could handsome, easygoing Theo really have killed a girl on our block? Could I have got the sweet, loving father, who makes up lullabies to sing my baby to sleep, so wrong?