Don’t Wake Daddy

A Psychological Thriller About Family, Memory, and the Truth No One Wanted to Tell

When Luke Bergstrom returns to his childhood home to clear out his late mother’s belongings, he expects boxes, dust, and old memories. What he finds instead is a game.

Don’t Wake Daddy — the same name his mother gave to a children’s board game found buried in a closet, and the same name he and his younger brother once gave to something far more dangerous: the private set of rules two boys invented to survive nights alone with an unpredictable, drinking father.

Luke buried that childhood thirty years ago, along with his brother, who drowned when Luke was twelve.

Except the deeper Luke digs — through a neighbor’s slip of the tongue, an old newspaper archive, a stack of paperwork his mother hid for decades — the less certain he becomes that any of it happened the way he was told. Somewhere between the story he was raised on and the one buried in his mother’s attic is a truth that was never meant to survive her.

Don’t Wake Daddy is a slow-burn psychological thriller about the stories families build to survive each other, and what it costs to finally tell the truth. Fans of domestic suspense, unreliable-memory thrillers, and family-secret mysteries will recognize the shape of this one from the first page — and won’t see where it’s actually going.

Start reading today.

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