A missing student. A dead man's confession. A neighbor who's been listening through the wall the whole time. Andy Kessler didn't move to Japan to find himself. He moved to disappear — from a mother he couldn't save, an engagement he couldn't hold together, and a life back in Ohio that had stopped feeling like his the moment he stopped needing to worry about money. Two years and one pandemic later, he's an ESL teacher in a small town nobody back home could find on a map, isolated by choice, drifting through a relationship he no longer knows how to be inside of. Then his student vanishes. Kenji Oda is nineteen, broke, and grieving a crypto crash that wiped out his savings — exactly the kind of quiet, well-behaved crisis the police don't take seriously. So Andy starts a true-crime podcast and goes looking himself, chasing a trail that leads through a UFO-watching cult meeting in a gravel lot above the reservoir, a twenty-two-year-old unsolved murder case, and a reclusive neighbor with a name that isn't really his. What Andy doesn't know is that someone has been feeding his every move to the person he's hunting — and it isn't a stranger. It's someone who's been sleeping six feet away from him for months. Never Trust Neighbor is a slow-burn psychological thriller about grief disguised as independence, kindness disguised as debt, and the terrifying ease with which the right person can walk through a wound and call it a door. Fans of The Departed's buried-mole reveal and Holly Jackson–style amateur-sleuth mysteries will recognize the machinery — but not, until it's too late, where the betrayal is actually coming from. A short novel. One sitting. Don't trust the guy next door.
