Fourteen-year-old Cassian Wintermere is used to being the quiet one in a family that's stopped talking to each other. A month ago, his father was poisoned. Six days later, his grandfather was murdered in his sleep. Neither case was solved, and the family has been holding its breath ever since, pretending the next flight, the next dinner, the next ordinary day might feel normal again. Then Cassian dies. He's on a private jet with his mother Karla, his uncle Bastian, his grandmother Moira, and a stranger named Zack Smooth, the pilot's fiancé, along for reasons no one quite explains — when the plane goes down. In the half-second before impact, Cassian sees it: the pilot's throat, already open, blood on someone's hand. He wakes up three days earlier, in his own bed, with the sound still in his ears. At first he thinks it's a nightmare. Then his parents mention the "surprise" trip at lunch, and the nightmare becomes a countdown. Cassian has three days to figure out two things: how to keep his family off that plane, and which one of them is capable of slitting a man's throat because he knows, with total certainty, that it was someone sitting at his own table.