I am grateful for my high school friend, producer and director Marguerite Henry, and her business partner, Vanessa Shapiro, for developing my last YA series, Proof of Lies. Optioning that project (during a pandemic!) helped push Small Town Monsters to the top of editors’ desks. I am also grateful to all the authors who offered advice before I signed Hollywood contracts, especially Frank Morelli, Gretchen McNeil, and Alisa Valdes.

Thank you to Chris Klock, and his amazing wife, Sheri—this is our fourth author photo together! To the friends who have stood by me for decades—the Ridley Girls, my BU roommates, my Spain friends, and everyone who comes to my book signings—thanks for keeping me laughing during the year 2020.

I’m an alum of an amazingly supportive university; thank you to everyone at the College of Communication at Boston University for publicizing my books and inviting me to speak. Alumni relations director Jacqueline R. A. Dragani—you were the last person I had lunch with before the world shut down, and I’ll never forget that!

I am lucky that my in-laws are not only incredibly kind but are also incredibly good copyeditors! Thank you to Paula and Larry Wallach for catching countless typos over the years. And thank you to all the Wallachs for your support, especially Matt and Cristina, whose former home has given me my first real office.

To my Rodriguez family—who will undoubtedly be the most scared of anyone I know when they read this book—if I didn’t grow up in such a Catholic home, I wouldn’t have been able to write this novel. I promise I’m okay, this is all fiction, and I’m not summoning demons into my life. To my brother, Lou, who will definitely think I’m in danger of being possessed, thank you for that long talk at Tierra Colombiana about mystical coincidences and the nature of good and evil. It worked its way into these pages. To my sister, Natalie, thanks for having a walking doll when we were little that scared the bejeezus out of us. To my parents, who are always the first people I call when something good happens with my books, thank you for believing everything I write deserves to be read and seen by the world. I promise I won’t put an Angel statue in any of your bedrooms while you’re sleeping.

To my husband, Jordan, the greatest compliment I have gotten on this book so far came the morning after you finished reading it. You turned to me and said, “You wrote this? Who did I marry? This is some dark shit!” That meant more than you know. Thank you for watching the kids when I was forced to have quarantined staycation writing retreats locked in our guest room. Without your support, my books wouldn’t be here; so, readers, you should thank him too.

To Juliet and Lincoln, you are not remotely old enough to read this yet, but I look forward to the day you are and I really get to creep you out.