Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the unsolved murder of a preteen girl and the disappearance of another.
For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly.
Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.
This book is deeply disturbing. The plot line features self-harm, sexualization of children, murder, child abuse and munchausen by proxy. The story starts of intruigingly, but gets progressively more disturbing, and somehow, towards the end, it felt rushed and incomplete. As though the author herself tired of writing anymore, and just wanted to get the damn thing done.
While the writing style is good, there is a feeling that she is trying too hard to pull back the veneer of the friendly small town community by thrusting every disturbing trope underneath. Every single character was filled with an intense hatred and cynicism about everything. They were all incredibly violent, shallow people with no other defining characteristics They were all very boring, flat people who just seemed to be awful without any motivation.