The Better Sister: A Novel

A Washington Post and Sun Sentinel Best Book of the Year

“Cunning. . . . Get ready to be led down the garden path to a conclusion so morally ambiguous a professional ethicist might have to be called in.”  — Washington Post

From Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of the runaway hit The Wife, comes another twisty suspense novel of domestic noir. When a prominent Manhattan lawyer is murdered, two estranged sisters—one the dead man’s widow, the other his ex—must set aside mistrust and old resentments. . . but can they escape their past?

Keep your enemies close and your sister closer.

Though Chloe was the younger of the two Taylor sisters, she always seemed to be the one in charge. She was the honor roll student with big dreams and an even bigger work ethic. Nicky—always restless and more than a little reckless—was the opposite of her ambitious little sister. She floated from job to job and man to man, and stayed close to home in Cleveland.

For a while, it seemed that both sisters had found happiness. Chloe earned a scholarship to an Ivy League school and moved to New York City, where she landed a coveted publishing job. Nicky married promising young attorney Adam Macintosh and gave birth to a baby boy they named Ethan. The Taylor sisters became virtual strangers.

Now, more than fifteen years later, their lives are drastically different—and Chloe is married to Adam. When he’s murdered by an intruder at the couple’s East Hampton beach house, what starts as a tragic crime quickly becomes a complex murder mystery, and Chloe reluctantly allows her teenage stepson’s biological mother—her estranged sister, Nicky—back into her life. But when the police begin to treat Ethan as a suspect in his father’s death, the two sisters are forced to unite in this gripping domestic thriller . . . and to confront the truth behind family secrets they have tried to bury in the past.