Pretty Girls: A Novel

Karin Slaughter

Sep 2015 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

Lee Child says it’s “stunning… certain to be a book of the year.”

 

Kathy Reichs calls it “extraordinary… a major achievement.”

 

Gillian Flynn says of Karin Slaughter: “I’d follow her anywhere.”

Sisters. Strangers. Survivors.

More than twenty years ago, Claire and Lydia’s teenaged sister Julia vanished without a trace. The two women have not spoken since, and now their lives could not be more different. Claire is the glamorous trophy wife of an Atlanta millionaire. Lydia, a single mother, dates an ex-con and struggles to make ends meet. But neither has recovered from the horror and heartbreak of their shared loss—a devastating wound that's cruelly ripped open when Claire's husband is killed.

The disappearance of a teenage girl and the murder of a middle-aged man, almost a quarter-century apart: what could connect them? Forming a wary truce, the surviving sisters look to the past to find the truth, unearthing the secrets that destroyed their family all those years ago . . . and uncovering the possibility of redemption, and revenge, where they least expect it.

Powerful, poignant, and utterly gripping, packed with indelible characters and unforgettable twists, Pretty Girls is a masterful novel from one of the finest writers working today.

Ratings and reviews

Dragged on and on with this far-fetched story. It started out well, and I kept hoping the storytelling would get back to that, but, no. I felt like the author was making it up as she went, trying to keep the reader engaged by putting in salacious, graphic, gory details of the works of the psychotic serial killer. I often rolled my eyes, even laughed at this story, but not in a good way. One of the worst books I ever read. Won't be reading this author again.

So this is pretty much the novel version of a gory horror movie. Lots of really stomach turning stuff. I'm not a fan of gory films, and not novels either. Even that, as a thriller it's, well, pretty dumb. The bad guy is supposedly brilliant, but constantly does extremely risky and stupid plans, that always happen to work out. No, brilliant people come up with low-risk and clever plans. And he has a network of hundreds of "customers," any of whom would ruin his plans of they were stupid, but apparently he's smart enough to always find "customers" who are capable of keeping his secrets and never accidentally letting honest people see what he's doing. And they all pay him lots of money. Honestly, if in the end you find out that he was a disguised space alien with a mind control beam, it would have been more believable. It seems to be an attempt to follow the model of Gillian Flynn or "The Girl on the Train" but with more violence, but it lacked their cleverness or the believable villains.

The book revels in extremely graphic depictions of very young women being sexually tortured, mutilated and murdered. The villain is a ridiculous caricature of a "brilliant" serial killer, and the whole book eventually seems more like a pretext for wallowing in pain and gore than it does a coherent story. The two lead characters, sisters drawn into the murders, are interesting, believable, and very well-drawn. They deserve a better book.

About the author

Karin Slaughter is one of the world’s most popular storytellers. She is the author of more than twenty instant New York Times bestselling novels, including the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and standalone novels The Good Daughter and Pretty Girls. An international bestseller, Slaughter is published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold across the globe. Pieces of Her is a #1 Netflix original series, Will Trent is a hit television series starring Ramón Rodríguez on ABC, and it was just announced that Jessica Biel will star in the adaptation of The Good Daughter, which Karin adapted herself. Karin Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming.