So Much Pretty
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'A man can only take so much pretty walking back and forth in front of him.'
When nineteen-year-old Wendy White disappears, the small town of Haeden, New York, is shaken to its core. The police are unable to trace the missing waitress; everyone assumes that she has run away. But, six months later, Wendy's tortured body is found in the nearby woods. She has only been dead for a matter of days.
With no one willing to talk, the investigation slows to a halt. But local reporter Stacy Flynn and high school student Alice Piper have their own reasons for finding out what really happened.
The truth behind Wendy's disappearance has a devastating effect on the town: what was once a rural idyll is now the backdrop to murder, violence and revenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this remarkable debut, Hoffman addresses serious injustices in present-day America. In 1992, Claire and Gene Piper, both idealistic New York City physicians, eschew joining Doctors Without Borders and decide instead to move with their gifted two-year-old daughter, Alice, to upstate Haeden, N.Y., to pursue the simple life in the spirit of the '60s back-to-nature movement. After nearly two fruitless decades, Gene's hope of destroying corporate agribusiness in the name of "land and air and autonomy" has left Claire exhausted, in body and soul, and Alice determined to avenge a ghastly crime against all women that she realizes is implicit in Haeden's smalltown ghost town mentality. Meanwhile, journalist Stacy Flynn indicts Big Pharm for forcing scientists to manipulate people into doing things the scientists believe are wrong, and factory food production for repurposing the countryside into a toxic-waste site. Hoffman's doomed characters burn their way off her angry pages. This searing novel will linger long in the reader's memory.
