The Wicked Girls
A Novel
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3.7 • 12 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“The suspense keeps the pages flying, but what sets this one apart is the palpable sense of onrushing doom.” —Stephen King, “The Best Books I Read This Year”
The Edgar Award-winning psychological thriller that asks the question: how well can you truly know anyone?
On a fateful summer morning in 1986, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time. By the end of the day, they will both be charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, journalist Kirsty Lindsay is reporting on a series of sickening attacks on young female tourists in a seaside vacation town when her investigation leads her to interview carnival cleaner Amber Gordon. For Kirsty and Amber, it’s the first time they’ve seen each other since that dark day so many years ago. Now with new, vastly different lives—and unknowing families to protect—will they really be able to keep their wicked secret hidden?
Gripping and fast-paced, with an ending that will stay with you long after you’ve read it, The Wicked Girls takes you to a thrillingly dark place you’ve never been before. For fans of Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, and Tana French.
“The Wicked Girls is ingenious and original. Real, chilling, true to its world and its characters. In short, a knock-out.” —Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of And When She Was Good and What the Dead Know
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A rundown British seaside amusement park, Funnland, provides the backdrop for the pseudonymous Marwood's memorable first novel. Thanks to U.K. rehab policies, impoverished Jade Walker and neglected Bel Oldacre accused, arrested, and sentenced as 11-year-olds for murdering a six-year-old girl in 1986 have become in 2011 Kirsty Lindsay, a newspaper stringer with an out-of-work husband, and Amber Gordon, a big-hearted Funnland cleaner, living with a handsome, enigmatic man given to black moods. Though the law forbids the two to meet, Amber's discovery of a teenage girl's body the third local murder that year in Innfinnity, the park's creepy hall of mirrors, and Kirsty's assignment to get the story behind the killings bring them together again. Marwood fills this disturbing thriller with sordid red herrings and brutal reflections of lower- and middle-class economic hardships, grinding in the sadly familiar message that societal injustice cruelly distorts women's lives.
