A young chef returns home to find her small town caught in the snare of an oil company. Her brother witnesses a chilling crime at the drilling site, and their attempts to bring justice are met with fierce opposition in this engrossing thriller.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from A Long Dark Night by Lilli Sutton, which releases on February 24th 2026.
After her restaurant closes and she returns to her childhood home, deep in the Alaskan wilderness, Nina has one goal: finding a way back out. Her family’s sled-dog business is struggling, and she is alarmed that her brother Grant is working at the nearby oil field. Grant comes home one day extremely unsettled by his involvement in disturbing events at work. The supervisor on duty orchestrated a suspiciously seamless coverup of a deadly accident, leading both siblings to wonder if the past disappearances of field workers are more than a coincidence.
Grant wants to forget the whole thing ever happened—the oil rig is the only source of employment that pays enough to keep their family afloat, and he doesn’t want to risk any jail time. But Nina can’t let this lie. The opportunity to uncover the truth about the disappearances and protect her family from increasing threats is too important. What starts as an attempt to unravel the mystery leads Nina, Grant, and their loved ones directly into the path of those determined to keep them silent no matter the cost.
Lilli Sutton returns with another atmospheric and captivating thriller in A Long Dark Night. Her debut novel, Running Out of Air, was called “an adventure worth taking,” “packed full of tension [and] heart.” Prepare to be left breathless again.
CHAPTER 12
Grant nearly jumped out of his skin when Nina sat down across from him. She shouldn’t be allowed, he thought, to just show up without warning in the cafeteria, cheeks flushed red from the cold, eyes loaded with intense purpose. Before he had a chance to ask why she was there, she unzipped her coat, pulled something from an interior pocket, and slid it across the table to him without saying a word.
“Oh,” Grant said, recognizing the object as his phone. “Thanks.” He thought briefly of the video, as he often did now when he saw his phone—the video, which he kept meaning to delete, his finger hovering over the trash-can icon before he turned off the screen. He didn’t know why he couldn’t let it go. Maybe that he wanted proof, in case things slipped out of his control. “You didn’t need to come all the way out here for this.”
He had realized he had forgotten it after arriving at work that morning, when he’d popped in his wireless earbuds and patted through his pockets—nothing. He usually listened to music or an NPR podcast while he worked. He downloaded new playlists and episodes whenever he had cell service, but he could survive a day without drowning out the background sounds of the shop. Besides providing entertainment, he didn’t use his phone much at work, and he’d planned to swing by home once his shift ended to grab it. Now he wondered how Nina had found it, where he’d left it.
“I walked past your room and saw it on your dresser,” Nina said before he could ask. “I thought you’d get bored out here without it.” She paused. “I didn’t have anything better to do so I thought I’d drop it off.”
A fair explanation—his dresser was visible from the hallway, though he wasn’t sure how she had noticed his phone amid all the clutter and couldn’t resist the urge to give her a hard time.
“You were snooping?”
He could have sworn Nina’s cheeks turned a brighter shade of red. “No. Why would I do that?”
He thought again of the video, a quick flash of panic. But his phone had a password, one he’d added when he started working at the oil field, in case he dropped it somewhere and a stranger picked it up. He shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. “I don’t know. Bored out of your mind?”
She relaxed a little, sitting back in the chair. “Yeah. But I wasn’t snooping.” Her focus shifted, traveling around the cafeteria, the sheet metal walls, the bright fluorescent lights, taking it in with interest. Grant tried to view it through her eyes, how expansive and industrial it must look. “So, this is the oil field.”
“The most or least exciting part of it, depending on who you ask. How did you find me?”
She pointed at the door. “I walked in. Well, I told the guy at the gate that I was your sister and I had something to bring you from home. He didn’t even ask for my ID. Anyway, I remembered you said you usually take lunch early. I thought I’d check here first. And I was right.” She paused. “Do you have time to show me around?”
Grant laughed. It was a ridiculous request, and Nina must realize it. He imagined her asking out loud, Remind me, which site did that guy die at? Even the idea of her being here made him nervous. He wanted to keep her visit as short as possible. “No, sorry. That’s not exactly allowed. But get something to eat if you want. They won’t ask for your ID, either.”
Nina wrinkled her nose at Grant’s half-eaten meal. “Is that pot roast?”
“Come on. You weren’t a food snob before you left.” “And I’m not one now,” Nina replied. “I was going to stop by the store on the way home. Get a few things for dinner.” She paused, looked down at her hands. “Guess who I ran into?”
He didn’t have the energy to rattle through a list of suspects. “Just tell me.”
“August,” Nina said, and Grant thought a trace of a smile crossed her face.
“Did he know you were back?”
“Yeah, Ila told him.” She paused. “Are you friends?”
“Sort of.” He wouldn’t have called August a friend, but he supposed they were. August, by virtue of being three years older, ran with a different crowd when they were kids, hung out with people Nina’s age and sometimes even Audrey’s. Two years didn’t make a difference, but for some reason three did, and Grant’s group of friends was totally separate. But he had seen August around plenty since he had taken the biologist position in Brooks Valley, sometimes chatting to the higher-ups at the oil field, sometimes riding a snow machine on the same paths Grant ran his dogs. He’d always thought August was a little quiet, a little difficult to talk to, even when he’d dated Nina in high school. But he’d always been enamored with Nina, ready to build a life around her—as long as that life involved staying in Alaska.
“Well,” Nina said, unfazed by Grant’s noncommittal answer, “we’re getting dinner next week.”
“A date?”
“God, I don’t know,” she replied, and her tone made Grant wonder if he’d struck a nerve. Did she want it to be a date, when it clearly wasn’t? Or maybe August was still in love with her and Nina wanted to be left alone. “Well, that’s all I came for,” Nina said, starting to stand up and rezip her jacket. She reached across the table, grabbed a piece of pot roast off Grant’s plate with her fingers, and narrowed her eyes as she chewed. “I thought the food here was supposed to be good.”
Grant laughed. “It’s good for Whitespur. Want me to walk you out?”
She shook her head. An expression that Grant couldn’t quite read passed over her face, and just as quickly, it vanished. “I’m a big girl. Thanks, though. See you at home?”
It crossed his mind that maybe she was going to poke around the oil field on her own. Maybe she had a fantasy of conducting her own investigation, of discovering the frozen body lying in the woods. But she wouldn’t get far; the cafeteria was the only place she could wander into without attracting attention. The security guard at the entrance might not do the best job of checking IDs, but maybe he didn’t need to—without the proper uniforms, any interlopers stuck out, and if someone showed up where they weren’t supposed to be, people asked questions. It was how Grant had discovered he was in the wrong place several times during his first year—getting borderline interrogated by a rig boss that wasn’t his.
“What are you making for dinner?”
“4950 moose burgers, minus the Hawaiian flare.”
“So, 49 burgers?”
Nina rolled her eyes. “Very funny.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be there.”
She grew smaller and smaller as she strode through the big building. The idea of Nina entering his room without him there unsettled him, but he didn’t have a good reason why, besides the basic invasion of privacy. He had told her about the video on the day of the accident, but he didn’t want to believe that she might go looking for it. Though if anyone could guess his password, that person would be Nina. He unlocked the phone quickly and scrolled through his camera roll. The video was still there. He changed the password to a string of numbers that meant nothing to him, random digits, and hoped he would remember it. He turned off the screen, exhaled, and set the phone face down on the table.
He still wasn’t used to living with one of his sisters again. Nina’s pots of moisturizer and dropper bottles of serum had been dwindling on the bathroom countertop, her expensive skincare slowly running out. The products were new—it was hard to find anything other than Bag Balm and Vaseline on the shelves at the general store—but the clutter wasn’t. Back when both Nina and Audrey lived at home, there was never an inch of free counter space, and Grant often didn’t get to even look in the mirror before heading to school. At least now he left for work so early that sharing bathroom space was never a problem.
But they’d all grown up practically sharing rooms, Audrey and Nina lounging on Grant’s bed or Grant falling asleep on their floor until his sisters woke him up by lightly kicking him in the stomach, insisting that he went back to his own room. After all, his room had belonged to Nina before he was born, and then she’d been forced to share with Audrey. Too many kids for this house, their mom used to say.
Grant ate another bite of his now-cold meal and stood up to clock back in, trying to shake the feeling that he was forgetting something. With the inspectors gone and the oil field reopened, he had nothing to worry about, in theory. But there was still a body in the woods.
Excerpted from A Long Dark Night by Lilli Sutton © 2026 by Lilli Sutton, used with permission from HarperCollins/Park Row Books.
