The Island of Lost Girls
A Novel
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4.2 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A stunning, genre-defying novel, poetic, immersive, and as dazzling as the Mediterranean sun even as it pulls the reader through the darkest corridors of human behavior. I was totally mesmerized. . . . Alex Marwood is in a class of her own.”—Lisa Jewell
“A stiletto of a novel: heart stopping and devastating.”—Jenny Colgan
Sun-drenched glamour and obscene wealth hide evil secrets in this ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about money, corruption, power and lost innocence from “one of crime fiction's brightest stars” (Megan Abbott), the Edgar and Macavity Award-winning author of The Wicked Girls and The Killer Next Door.
It's paradise for the super-rich, but hell for the girls whose lives they've stolen
1985
To twelve-year-old Mercedes, La Kastellana is home, an island with deep-rooted traditions untouched by the modern world. But this secluded paradise is upended with the arrival of multimillionaire Matthew Meade and his pampered young daughter, Tatiana. While the Meades lavishly spread unimaginable wealth around La Kastellana, the price Mercedes and the rest of the islanders will pay is more than they could ever have imagined.
2016
Robin has been desperately searching for her seventeen-year-old daughter Gemma, who’s been missing for more than a year. Finding herself on La Kastellana, an island playground for the international jet set, Robin quickly realizes she’s out of her depth. No one is willing to help and Robin fears she’s running out of time to find her child.
But someone has been watching, silently waiting for the moment to expose the dark truth of what really happens on the island of lost girls.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The idyllic Mediterranean isle of La Kastellana is fictional, but much of what transpires there is all too real in this disturbing thriller from Edgar winner Marwood (The Poison Garden). The three-decade-hopping narrative starts in July 1985, when London-based tycoon Matthew Reade docks his yacht in La Kastellana, planning to develop the unspoiled setting into "the New Capri," and his bored 13-year-old daughter Tatiana seizes on local Mercedes Delia, just a few months younger, as the plaything she must secure for the summer. This proves a devil's bargain for Mercedes, who remains trapped in a web with Tatiana and her father into adulthood as a powerless witness to the abuses inflicted on the barely legal beauties they groom for the delectation of Matthew and his cronies. Meanwhile, an undercover Europol investigation of human trafficking zeroes in on La Kastellana, and in 2016, a desperate British mother arrives on the island in a last-ditch effort to find her runaway 17-year-old daughter. Marwood builds her ripped-from-the-headlines premise into something sprawling and admirably ambitious. The suspenseful results should satisfy readers with stomachs strong enough to handle the gruesome details.
