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.
Bernadette Anne MacDougall, better known by her pen name B. A. Paris, is a Franco-British writer of fiction, mainly in the psychological thriller subgenre. Her debut novel, Behind Closed Doors (2016), was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. It has been translated into 40 languages and sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide.