The Boyfriend

Sydney Shaw is exhausted by dating in New York City — the apps, the disappointments, the small daily indignities of looking for love among strangers. So when she meets Tom, who is handsome, attentive, and seems genuinely too good to be true, she lets herself hope. Meanwhile, a killer is moving through the city’s dating scene, charming young women before murdering them, and the news is full of warnings. As Sydney falls for Tom, she starts to notice the gaps in his stories and the small lies that don’t add up, and begins to wonder whether the man she’s falling for is exactly the danger everyone is talking about. Told from shifting perspectives that keep the reader a step ahead of, and then behind, its heroine, the novel plays the modern paranoia of dating a near-stranger for maximum suspense before tipping into one of McFadden’s most deliberately outrageous endings.