Pretty Girls

After drinks one night, wealthy architect Paul Scott becomes amorous and pulls his wife, Claire, into an alley for some sexy action. His spontaneity has disastrous results and destroys Claire's glamorous life. In the aftermath, she finds she may not know her husband as well as she thought--or at all.

Claire reaches out to her sister Lydia Delgado for help, and the two have an uneasy reunion. They've been long estranged, with Lydia ceasing contact after the 1991 disappearance of their eldest sister, Julia, from her college campus. But another coed has recently gone missing, and Claire and Lydia think the disappearance is somehow connected to their sister. They embark on a mission to solve finally the mystery surrounding Julia, braving great danger while reopening old wounds that never completely healed.

Pretty Girls, Karin Slaughter's second standalone after the Edgar-nominated Cop Town, is told from three points of view: Claire's, Lydia's and that of their father, Sam, via his old journal entries. Together they show the shattering effects of loss on a previously healthy family, how not knowing if a loved one was still alive could cause the ones left behind to stop leading their own lives.

The novel is devastating when focused on this, which makes the gory details of certain crimes seem jarring and unnecessary. It might have been more effective breaking readers' hearts without churning their stomachs, too. But Girls is a powerful examination of grief, and thriller fans will get more than their money's worth. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

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