Nina realizes that Christian’s car matches the car of her intruder, per the Ring video that a neighbor sent her. Lily doesn’t answer directly. Instead she says, “I didn’t hear you come up the stairs. I thought you were still downstairs.” Thank you to the author Mary Kubica, publishers Park Row and Harper Collins, and Edelweiss, for an advance digital copy of JUST THE NICEST COUPLE. Lily Scott and Nina Hayes have been good friends ever since Nina was assigned as Lily’s mentor when she began teaching at the same high school. What started as a mentor-mentee relationship soon developed into a terrific, fulfilling friendship as Lily learned about the ins and outs of high school students (spoiler: teenage girls can be mean to you no matter your age or status) and began to carve a niche for herself as one of the youngest, prettiest teachers. Since then, they’ve shared drinks and gossiped at staff events, hosted one another and their husbands for dinners, and confided in one another about not just teaching woes, but their marital and fertility issues as well.

Jake Hayes is missing. At first, his wife, Nina, thinks he’s taking a break after their huge fight from the night before. But days go by and Jake is no where to be found, Nina starts to worry. Where is Jake? Bestselling author Mary Kubica earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and American Literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, before embarking on a career as a high school history teacher. Her thrillers, including The Good Girl, Pretty Baby, Don’t You Cry, Every Last Lie, When the Lights Go Out, The Other Mrs., and Local Woman Missing. To date, her novels have sold over two million copies worldwide and been translated into more than thirty languages. JUST THE NICEST COUPLE is the latest novel from Mary Kubica, the bestselling author of such books as THE GOOD GIRL, THE OTHER MRS. and LOCAL WOMAN MISSING. This time, she has penned a domestic thriller about two couples with plenty of reasons to envy one another, but even more secrets.

Need Help?

What was that?” I ask as I gently lower Lily’s arms. Lily isn’t usually so jumpy. I’ve never seen that kind of reaction from her. First things first, even the blurb on this is B.S. Lily and Christian and Jake and Nina weren’t “close” friends. Lily and Nina were freaking work friends and every once in a while their husbands would be forced into mingling. So now that’s out of the way, the whole premise here is that Jake has gone missing and Lily thinks she might have done a bad bad thing.

I have only two thoughts in that moment: staying alive, and that this isn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

Mary Kubica

When we meet the couples, Lily is pregnant…again. She has suffered multiple miscarriages and is now both terrified of losing her most recent pregnancy and almost convinced that it will happen again. As a result, she is overly cautious, putting an end to her usual running routine and trying to avoid stress as much as possible. Across town, Nina and Jake have had a blowout fight: Nina, Jake claims, has been spending too much time with her ailing mother and has put him second, which annoys the smug, self-centered surgeon. At 38, Nina is conscious that she definitely does not want to start over, especially if she would like to have children one day. But even so, she cannot help the ugly, vicious words that come out of her mouth: If you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave?