Cora decided to murder her husband while he was explaining the correct way to load a dishwasher.
Eleven years of marriage to Felix have made Cora an expert in the arithmetic of politeness. Their smart home listens, their community watches, and Saint Orison - a development run on courtesy committees, review panels, and a vow-renewal ceremony two hundred married people attend out of obligation - administers other people's lives with frictionless efficiency.
In her notebook, beneath the dinner debts and the invitations that cannot be declined, Cora keeps the Courtesy List: people to invite, people to avoid, people whose attendance demands a reciprocal gesture. Her husband's name is at the bottom, crossed out so hard the nib scored the paper.
Killing a man whose company built the house - a house that reports every raised voice, every opened door, every scored page - requires courtesy of a very particular kind. As Vow Renewal Night arrives and the storm closes the causeway, Cora's list resolves itself, one name at a time, into something the panels were never meant to read.
And when Detective Nia Rao begins to ask polite questions about the night Felix's car left the road and the lake took its time, Cora discovers that the most dangerous entry on any list is the one you write after the investigation ends.
A razor-sharp, darkly funny domestic noir about marriage, surveillance, and the violence of good manners - for readers of Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and Big Little Lies.
Courtesy, properly applied, is simply control with good table manners.
