What if you found out that your family isn’t yours at all? How far would you go to protect them? A gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of  The Girl Before . . . . “[JP] Delaney takes domestic suspense beyond its comfort zone.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review Pete Riley answers the door one morning and lets in a parent’s worst nightmare. On his doorstep is Miles Lambert, a stranger who breaks the devastating news that Pete’s son, Theo, isn’t actually his son—he is the Lamberts’, switched at birth by an understaffed hospital while their real son was sent home with Miles and his wife, Lucy. For Pete, his partner Maddie, and the little boy they’ve been raising for the past two years, life will never be the same again.   The two families, reeling from the shock, take comfort in shared good intentions, eagerly entwining their very different lives in the hope of becoming one unconventional modern family. But a plan to sue the hospital triggers an official investigation that unearths some disturbing questions about the night their children were switched. How much can they trust the other parents—or even each other? What secrets are hidden behind the Lamberts’ glossy front door? Stretched to the breaking point, Pete and Maddie discover they will each stop at nothing to keep their family safe.   They are done playing nice. “When it comes to ordinary families faced with terrifying dilemmas, there is no one better than JP Delaney. He is King of Thrillers, and  Playing Nice  is his best book yet. His chilling, compelling and oh-so-real books force us to confront our darkest fears—and question how far we would go to protect those we love. . . . Brilliant.” —Fiona Cummins, author of  Rattle “Many thrillers require some suspension of disbelief, but not this one—its psychological soundness is what makes it both utterly terrifying and compelling. These masterfully drawn characters wouldn’t let me go until I raced my way to the final page.  Playing Nice  deserves a spot at the very top of every reader’s TBR pile.” — Stephanie Wrobel, author of  Darling Rose Gold   “JP Delaney has done it again: whip smart prose and a cracking concept. . . . Compulsive from start to finish!” — Lesley Kara, internationally bestselling author of  The Rumor “A nightmarsh scenario drives this gripping psychological thriller . . . Genuinely surprising twists reveal just how far a parent will go for the sake of a child. This is domestic suspense at its most unsettling.” — Publishers Weekly Pete It was just an ordinary day. If this were a color piece or a feature, the kind of thing I used to write on a daily basis, the editor would have rejected it just for that opening sentence. Openers need to hook people, Pete, she’d tell me, tossing my pages back at me across my desk. Paint a picture, set a scene. Be dramatic. In travel journalism especially, you need a sense of place. Take me on a journey. So: It was just an ordinary day in Willesden Green, north London. Because the fact is, before that knock on my door, it was just an ordinary day. An unusually nice one, admittedly. The sun was shining, the air was crisp and blue. There was still some snow on the ground, hiding in corners, but it had that soft sugary look snow gets when it’s all but melted, and none of the kids streaming into the Acol Road Nursery and Preschool could be bothered to get their mittens wet trying to scoop it up for snowballs. Actually, there was one small thing out of the ordinary. As I took Theo into the nursery, or rather followed him in—we’d given him a scooter for his second birthday, a chunky three-wheeler he was now inseparable from—I noticed three people, a woman and two men, on the other side of the road, watching us. The younger man was roughly my age, thirty or so. The other was in his fifties. Both wore dark suits with dark woolen coats over them, and the woman, a blonde, was wrapped up in a kind of fake-fur parka, the sort of thing you might see on a fashionable ski slope. They looked too smart for our part of London. But then I saw that the older man was holding a document case in his gloved hand. An estate agent, I guessed, showing some prospective buyers the local childcare facilities. The Jubilee Line goes all the way from our Tube station to Canary Wharf, and even the bankers have been priced out of West Hampstead these days. Something about the younger man seemed familiar. But then I was distracted by Jane Tigman, whose son Zack was already starting to thrash and scream in her arms at the prospect of being left. She hadn’t realized that the trick is to make sure they walk into nursery on their own rather than being carried, which simply makes the moment of separation more final. Then there was a note about World Book Day on the nursery door that hadn’t been there yesterday—God, yet another costume I’d have to organize—and after that I had to separate Theo from his helmet, gloves, and coat, stuff