Playing Nice

Pete

It was just an ordinary day.

If this were a color piece or a feature, the kind of thing I used to write on a daily basis, the editor would have rejected it just for that opening sentence. Openers need to hook people, Pete, she d tell me, tossing my pages back at me across my desk. Paint a picture, set a scene. Be dramatic. In travel journalism especially, you need a sense of place. Take me on a journey.

So: It was just an ordinary day in Willesden Green, north London.

Because the fact is, before that knock on my door, it was just an ordinary day. An unusually nice one, admittedly. The sun was shining, the air was crisp and blue. There was still some snow on the ground, hiding in corners, but it had that soft sugary look snow gets when it s all but melted, and none of the kids streaming into the Acol Road Nursery and Preschool could be bothered to get their mittens wet trying to scoop it up for snowballs.

Actually, there was one small thing out of the ordinary. As I took Theo into the nursery, or rather followed him in we d given him a scooter for his second birthday, a chunky three-wheeler he was now inseparable from I noticed three people, a woman and two men, on the other side of the road, watching us. The younger man was roughly my age, thirty or so. The other was in his fifties. Both wore dark suits with dark woolen coats over them, and the woman, a blonde, was wrapped up in a kind of fake-fur parka, the sort of thing you might see on a fashionable ski slope. They looked too smart for our part of London. But then I saw that the older man was holding a document case in his gloved hand. An estate agent, I guessed, showing some prospective buyers the local childcare facilities. The Jubilee Line goes all the way from our Tube station to Canary Wharf, and even the bankers have been priced out of West Hampstead these days.

Something about the younger man seemed familiar. But then I was distracted by Jane Tigman, whose son Zack was already

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Before, Believe Me, and The Perfect Wife, JP Delaney has previously written bestselling fiction under other names.

When it comes to ordinary families faced with terrifying dilemmas, there is no one better than JP Delaney. He is King of Thrillers, and Playing Nice is his best book yet. His chilling, compelling and oh-so-real books force us to confront our darkest fears and question how far we would go to protect those we love. . . . Brilliant. Fiona Cummins, author of Rattle

Many thrillers require some suspension of disbelief, but not this one its psychological soundness is what makes it both utterly terrifying and compelling. These masterfully drawn characters wouldn t let me go until I raced my way to the final page. Playing Nice deserves a spot at the very top of every reader s TBR pile. Stephanie Wrobel, author of Darling Rose Gold
 
JP Delaney has done it again: whip smart prose and a cracking concept. . . . Compulsive from start to finish! Lesley Kara, internationally bestselling author of The Rumor

A nightmarsh scenario drives this gripping psychological thriller . . . Genuinely surprising twists reveal just how far a parent will go for the sake of a child. This is domestic suspense at its most unsettling. Publishers Weekly