The Breakdown
One rainy night, driving home through the woods along a route her husband begged her to avoid, Cass passes a car pulled over on the shoulder with a woman sitting inside. She doesn't stop. The next morning she learns the woman was murdered — and that she was someone Cass had recently come to know.
Consumed by guilt over the life she might have saved, Cass begins to unravel. She is forgetting things: whether she took her pills, where she parked, the code to her own alarm, why she ordered a pram when there is no baby. Then come the silent phone calls, and the growing certainty that someone is watching her. As her memory fails and her dread deepens — she is terrified of inheriting her mother's early-onset dementia — Cass can no longer be sure of anything, least of all herself.
A taut domestic thriller from the bestselling author of Behind Closed Doors, B.A. Paris's The Breakdown is a claustrophobic story of guilt, fear, and the terror of not being able to trust your own mind.
A schoolteacher spiraling into guilt and forgetfulness after failing to help a woman who is later found murdered.
Cass's attentive husband.
Cass's close friend and confidante.
The novel was adapted into a film titled Blackwater Lane, which is available to stream.
This is a standalone novel and does not require reading any of the author's other books to follow the plot.