It’s May 23, and small town Promise Falls finds itself in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe with dozens dead from a flu-like virus. Investigator Cal Weaver quickly zeros in on mass poisoning and a tainted water supply.
 
Meanwhile, a college student has been murdered, and Detective Barry Duckworth recognizes a killer’s handiwork from the unsolved homicides of two women in town. Suddenly, the strange events from the last month start to add up….Bloody mannequins in car “23” of an abandoned Ferris wheel…a fiery, out-of-control bus with “23” on the back…“23” on the hoodie of a man accused of assault.

She knew it was a weird place. She’d heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books

In the third book in the Neapolitan quartet, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.

When a newborn baby dies after a routine hospital procedure, there is no doubt about who will be held responsible: the nurse who had been banned from looking after him by his father.

Have you ever struggled to make a decision? Tried to figure out the winning bidding strategy at an auction? Wondered how best to split the bill in a restaurant? Divide an inheritance? Wished you were better at negotiating? Thought about how to discourage a spouse from cheating