Is there an audiobook of The Couple Next Door?

Yes. The Couple Next Door has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Kirsten Potter.

How long is the The Couple Next Door audiobook?

The The Couple Next Door audiobook runs 8 hr 40 min.

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena book cover for the Book of the Day thriller book review

Our score

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to The Couple Next Door free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDAugust 2016

Genres

Fiction Thriller Suspense

Themes

Marriage and the secrets kept inside itPostpartum depression and unreliable memoryMoney, class, and controlling parentsParental guilt and blame

The Couple Next Door

Name: The Couple Next Door
Price: 7.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Shari Lapena

Shari Lapena

Shari Lapena's debut domestic thriller opens with a baby missing from her crib while her parents drink wine next door, then spends three hundred pages proving the intruder was the least of what was wrong in that house. Fast, cold, and built for readers who like a suspect list that keeps rearranging itself.

The Review

Our take

Lapena writes the whole book in present tense, and the choice pays off immediately. Nobody has finished making their mistake yet. Anne and Marco Conti are still at the dinner party next door, still telling themselves a baby monitor and a half-hourly check counts as supervision, still twenty minutes from the walk home that ends with their front door standing open and six-month-old Cora gone. Chapters run short. The prose is plain to the point of being furniture, which turns out to be the right call for a book that wants you watching people rather than sentences.

The roving point of view is the engine. Lapena slides between Anne, Marco, the neighbors, and Detective Rasbach with almost no ceremony, so the reader always knows slightly more than any single character and never enough to relax. Around chapter six you stop reading paragraphs and start auditing them. Marco's business is failing and he hasn't said so. Anne's memory has holes in it she cannot account for, and the postpartum months have not gone the way the family photographs suggest. Circling both of them are Anne's parents, rich enough to have bought their way out of every previous problem and visibly willing to try again. Rasbach is the best company in the book: a detective who starts from the assumption that the parents did it, because the parents usually did, and who is unfailingly courteous about saying so.

The middle sags. Once the investigation settles into interviews and waiting, there's a stretch of the novel that circles the same three suspicions, and the efficient style that felt lean early begins to feel merely thin. Plenty of readers skim that patch. Then the last third arrives with reveals at a rate that would collapse a slower book, and one of them asks for real generosity. Lapena did plant them, though. Go back and the groundwork is there, buried mostly in what people declined to explain the first time around.

Why you should read

Domestic suspense where the marriage is the crime scene
Short chapters and present-tense momentum
Procedurals with a patient, unshowy detective
Reveals that stack up hard in the final third

What to expect

Plain, functional prose that stays out of the way
Multiple points of view, including the detective's
A slack middle stretch before the reveals land
Present tense from first page to last

The kidnapping is the hook. The marriage is the actual subject, and it is the harder story by a distance: two people discovering across one terrible week that the person they married has been keeping a parallel ledger of their life together, and that neither ledger balances. Setup honored, no cheating at the finish. Lapena also declines to hand the Contis a soft landing, and the final page carries a chill that a more cautious debut would have sanded down to something comfortable. She left it sharp.

Reviewed by Quinn · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to The Couple Next Door free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Couple Next Door?: Yes. The Couple Next Door has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Kirsten Potter.
Listen to The Couple Next Door free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the The Couple Next Door audiobook?: The The Couple Next Door audiobook runs 8 hr 40 min.
How much does The Couple Next Door cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $7.99, Paperback $9.90, Hardcover $17.81. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

Filed underThriller Suspense Browse the archive →

Common questions

What is The Couple Next Door about?: Lapena writes the whole book in present tense, and the choice pays off immediately. Nobody has finished making their mistake yet. Anne and Marco Conti are still at the dinner party next door, still telling themselves a baby monitor and a half-hourly check counts as supervision, still twenty…
Is The Couple Next Door worth reading?: We scored The Couple Next Door 4.2 out of 5. Shari Lapena's debut domestic thriller opens with a baby missing from her crib while her parents drink wine next door, then spends three hundred pages proving the intruder was the least of what was wrong in that house. Fast, cold, and built for readers who like a suspect list…