R.J. Jacobs

A chilling, twisting thriller for readers of In a Dark, Dark Wood Emily manages her bipolar disorder well enough to work as a moderately successful child psychologist, and is building a serious relationship with her boyfriend Paolo. When he wants to take her on an overnight sailing trip, Emily knows her medication, generous amounts of wine, and her attraction to Paolo will help her deal with her aversion to the water and forget the fact that she can’t swim. But after a romantic night, Emily wakes up on the sailboat, completely alone, drifting through the waves. Her world is tuned upside down as she becomes a person of interest while grieving Paolo, never getting answers or closure to what happened to him. He was a strong swimmer, and she cannot believe he simply drowned. With her personal and professional life in shambles, Emily attempts to find out the truth and clear her name, discovering a deeper and more dangerous plot than she ever suspected. Fueled by her own mania, Emily questions her own judgment every step of the way.

A Novel

And Then You Were Gone

For fans of Riley Sager with a classic slasher twist, Always the First to Die follows a former horror movie actress as she returns to the set of her most iconic film, only to find that the strange circumstances begin to resemble the plot of her most famous film. After her husband's death, Lexi has refused to return to the Pinecrest Estate on the Florida Keys, too many hard memories on that strip of land. Memories of meeting her husband on the set of an iconic horror movie. Of being cast as an extra, of watching herself get killed on screen. And of scoffing at the rumors of the Pinecrest Estate "curse," until she witnessed a cast member die that very summer. But when her daughter sneaks away to visit her grandfather, legendary horror movie director Rick Plummer, Lexi is forced to face her past. That's when a Category Four hurricane changes course, and hits the southern coast. Unable to get through to her daughter, Lexi drives to the Keys in the wake of the storm. What she finds is an island without cell service, without power, and with limited police presence. A desolate bit of land, with only a few remaining behind: the horror director, the starlet once cast as the final girl, the young teenager searching for clues of her father, the mother determined to get off the island, and...the person picking them off one-by-one. Soon enough Lexi's life begins to resemble Rick's most famous horror film, and she must risk her life to save her daughter before someone, or something, destroys them all.

Always the First to Die

"A captivating exploration into the psychology of lying, and a high-stakes, dark-academia thriller full of twists and secrets." —New York Times bestselling author Megan Miranda Riley Sager meets If We Were Villains in a compelling new psychological thriller following a cohort of graduate students studying the psychology of lying—until one of them is discovered dead. But how do you catch a killer who may be an expert in the science of deception? Campus is empty, a winter storm is blowing in, and someone is lurking in the shadows, waiting for their chance to kill again. Forest, North Carolina. Under the instruction of enigmatic Professor Joe Lyons, five graduate students are studying the tedious science behind the acts of lying. But discovering the secrets of deception isn't making any of the student's more honest though. Instead, it's making it easier for them to guard their own secrets – and they all have something to hide. When a test goes awry and one of them is found dead, the students find themselves trapped by a snowstorm on an abandoned campus with a local detective on the case. As harbored secrets begin to break the surface, the graduates must find out who's lying, who isn't, and who may have been capable of committing murder. It turns out deception is even more dangerous than they thought... A foreboding new dark academia thriller of deception and suspense, This is How We End Things follows the unraveling of a close group of students as they contend with what it means to lie, and be lied to.

R.J. Jacobs

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