Fleeing a relationship gone violent, Alice and her ten-year-old son, Oren, are taken by social worker Mattie not to a shelter but to her ramshackle house in the woods. Sure, Mattie is a do-gooder with plenty of room, but Oren also reminds her of the little brother she lost 30 years ago. Mary Higgins Clark Award winner Goodman creeps us out. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

This brilliantly conceived and executed gothic thriller from Mary Higgins Clark Award winner Goodman (The Other Mother) opens on a bus heading through Upstate New York on a cold and snowy December day. Alice, a frightened woman in her 30s, and Oren, a 10-year-old boy with a passion for Star Wars and Greek mythology, are fleeing from Oren's abusive father Davis, who has threatened to kill Alice, his lover, and reclaim Oren. They arrive at the little town of Delphi, where they are met by Mattie, "a woman on the wrong side of fifty," who acts as a volunteer at a women's shelter and is charged with taking the two to a safe house. Instead, she abandons protocol and takes them back to her home, an elegant, if dilapidated, Victorian pile. Mattie doesn't reveal that Oren reminds her of her brother, who died years before at age 10. Alice in turn has her own secrets. The tension builds with delicate precision toward the ultimate confrontation with Davis. Goodman provides readers with that delicious frisson that comes from not knowing what will happen next. Agent: Robin Rue, Writers House. (Mar.)