Promise Not to Tell

by Jennifer McMahon

Published 10 April 2007

Part coming-of-age novel, part ghost story, part psychological thriller - a powerful novel of adolescent friendship, betrayal and murder

Kate Cypher has returned home to Vermont, after a telephone call from friends who are worried about her mother's failing health. On the night she arrives, a young girl is murdered, a horrific crime that eerily mirrors another from Kate's childhood.

Three decades earlier, her misfit friend Del, shunned and derided by her classmates as "the potato girl", was brutally slain. Del's killer was never found, and Del achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories.

Now, as the new murder investigation draws Kate irresistibly in, her past and present collide in terrifying and unexpected ways. But nothing is quite what it seems - and the grim spectres of her childhood are far from forgotten.