By A Spider's Thread

Some of the seemingly happiest families have the darkest secrets...
A superbly tense thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of SUNBURN and LADY IN THE LAKE.
Natalie Rubin, middle-class Jewish wife and mother, has vanished. Worse, she has taken her three children with her. Her husband, Mark, is devastated. He loves her; and he thought she was happy. So he approaches Tess to trace her.
At first Tess is wary. She doesn't like getting involved in domestic disputes, and Mark's love for his wife seems to contain a disturbing desire to control her. Did he drive her away? Did he perhaps kill her? But as Tess pursues her quest for Natalie, she discovers a woman with a mysterious past, a man whose values will challenge her own, and a family that knows how to keep its secrets ...
BY A SPIDER'S THREAD is part tense thriller and part all-too-human drama about what families do to each other.

Private investigator Tess Monaghan doesn't know quite what to make of her new client, Mark Rubin—a wealthy Orthodox Jew who refuses to shake her hand and doles out vitally important information in grudging dribs and drabs. The successful Baltimore furrier claims he and his beautiful wife had a flawless, happy marriage. Yet one day, without warning, Natalie gathered up their children and vanished—and the police can't do anything because all the evidence indicates she left willingly.

But the deeper Tess digs, the more she suspects that the motive behind Natalie's reckless flight lies somewhere in the gap between what Rubin will not say and what he refuses to believe. An intricate web of betrayal and vengeance is already beginning to unravel, as memory begets rage, and rage begets desperation . . . and murder. And suddenly the lives of three innocent children are dangling by the slenderest of threads.