Obviously, Janey Pringle was her first choice. She gave herself ten slots to fill out her team. Leigh had her fantasy apocalypse fightclub. Nobody wanted another Night of the Long Nasal Swabs. Hand sanitizer flowed like peach schnapps at a prom. The auditorium was one quarter full, taped off empty seats keeping everyone at a distance. This was the only way to make sure all the parents got to see their kids whether they wanted to or not. Tonight was the closing night after five consecutive Sunday performances. Leigh let her gaze wander around the audience. He was telling his mother that a man with a suitcase had followed him home, a scenario that today would’ve ended in a SWAT stand-off. A spotlight swung onto a Dutch exchange student filling the role of Marian Paroo. Walter was an amazing father, but Leigh had finally accepted that she was the bad type of woman who couldn’t stay with a good man. Their marriage had ended when Maddy was twelve, but during last year’s lockdown, they had all ended up living at Walter’s house and then Leigh had ended up in his bed and then she’d realized why it hadn’t worked out in the first place. Leigh felt an unwelcome lurch in her heart. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes told her that he was grinning behind his mask. Leigh typed- If that was true, we would still be together. Walter kept his head down, but she could tell from the ellipsis that he was responding- I can do two things at once. She slipped her phone out of her purse and texted- Maddy is going to ask you questions about the performance. Leigh didn’t have to see what was in his hands to know that he was playing fantasy football on his phone. His head was tilted at a weird angle, sort of looking at the stage, sort of looking at the back of the empty seat in front of him. He was two rows down, closer to the aisle. She’d thought that her days of watching nose-pickers, mama’s boys, and stage hogs break into song were blissfully over, but then Maddy had taken an interest in teaching choreography so here they were, trapped in this hellhole of trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool. Leigh’s daughter had just turned sixteen years old. She doubted a generation that had grown up with WAP, murder hornets, Covid, a failed insurrection and being forcibly home-schooled by a bunch of depressed day drinkers really understood the threat of pool halls, but Leigh had to hand it to the drama teacher for putting on a gender-neutral production of the The Music Man, one of the least offensive and most tedious musicals ever staged by a middle school. Not a wholesome trottin’ race, no! But a race where they set right down on the horse! A gaggle of tweens skipped across the stage as Professor Hill warned the townsfolk about out-of-town jaspers luring their sons into horse-race gambling. Leigh Collier bit her lip as a seventh-grade girl belted out “Ya Got Trouble” to a captive audience. Here, Good Housekeeping readers can enjoy an exclusive sneak preview extract of the book. Her latest book, False Witness is out soon. She's now written 27 novels, including the Will Trent series (which also features Sara Linton) and several standalone thrillers. The follow-up, Kisscut, was a best-seller and her career as a writer was up and running. Her debut was Blindsighted, released in 2001, the first of her Grant County books featuring paediatrician and part-time coroner Sara Linton. Among her millions of fans are Lee Child, Gillian Flynn and Kathy Reichs. As the queen of explosive thrillers, Karin Slaughter is one of the best-selling authors in the world, with over 35 million copies of her books sold.
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