Unputdownable · Psychological Suspense · Horror · Tense · Gripping A FALLON BOOK CLUB PICK “Pulse-pounding locked-room suspense.” —Elle “ Nightwatching is like nothing I've read before. I wolfed it down in two sittings; it's amazing.”—Lisa Jewell A footstep on the stairs. A second to react. What happens next will determine everything. Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants. Praise for Nightwatching: “Phenomenal. . . thrilling.” —Jimmy Fallon “[ Nightwatching ] guarantees you will stay up, as I did, way past bedtime, tearing through pages to find out what happens, or you’ll be too petrified to sleep, or maybe both.” —Mary Louise Kelly, NPR “Horror meets thriller in this pulse-pounding locked-room suspense, playing off the dread (and claustrophobia) of being trapped in your home with an intruder. . . Sierra manages to integrate complex ideas about perception, trauma, guilt, and women’s autonomy...without once loosening her grip on the reader’s nerves.” —Elle “How many of us have had the experience of hearing an old house creak in the night and wondering if it was something more? That uneasiness becomes terror in Sierra’s riveting debut. . . . What happens next falls between horror and suspense, landing with almost unbearable intensity. . . Nightwatching [is] among the best debuts I’ve read in years.” —LA Times “[ Nightwatching ] truly terrified me. . . this was literally catnip for my intrusive thoughts. My heart never stopped racing.” —USA Today “The reader is thrust into a scenario of unadulterated fear in Tracy Sierra’s stellar debut. . . To describe this novel as nightmarish contrasts with the vividness of this night, as Sierra escorts the reader beyond metaphor: Is it a nightmare if it’s real? Nightwatching is a terrifying cat-and-mouse thriller in which the creak on the stairs is an overture to a fight for survival.” —Washington Post “Nightwatching is one of those reads I devour: a thrilling mystery with an actual message and larger societal commentary contained within. . . Sierra's plot is propulsive and is literally heart-pounding. . . Along the way, she raises important questions about who gets to be a victim and how hard it is for women to be believed. It will enrage you, it will scare you, and it will definitely make you want to discuss it.” — Glamour “ Nightwatching grows in stature and becomes not just a nerve-shredding page-turner but also an ingenious guessing game and an absorbing account of a woman's struggle to make her voice heard.” — Minneapolis StarTribune “The extreme tension . . . triumphs in a gripping and convincing finale. Not for the faint-hearted.” — The Daily Mail “So terrifying that it can easily be considered horror-adjacent. . . The intense plunge into the main character’s traumatic experience feels incredibly real and immediate, and the suspense doesn’t let up until the last moments of the novel.” — BookPage “Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. . . Gripping.” —CrimeReads “This is an intelligent, excoriating and almost unbearably tense look at what can happen when men choose to assume that a woman is hysterical rather than taking her seriously.”  —The Guardian (London) “The most gripping thriller I have ever read. . . I was astounded at how Sierra kept up the pace in this high-wire act of a thriller, but she doesn’t put a single foot wrong.”  —Scary Mommy “ Nightwatching is just as much a psychological thriller as it is a horror story. Powerful and absorbing, it was not easy to put this book down until I finished it. In my opinion, that is the mark of an excellent story. Highly recommended.” —Fresh Fiction “Outstanding. . . As grippingly suspenseful as the plot is, Sierra’s first outing boasts other strengths just as noteworthy, from its transportingly eerie setting to its indelible main character, a petite, prototypical 'good girl' pushed to the brink by years of being underestimated, patronized, and disbelieved by men with power.