The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is another compulsively readable, highly impressive work of reportage from Sonia Faleiro, author of the acclaimed Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars. The Good Girls investigates the deaths of a pair of young girls, Padma and Lalli, in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India. The girls' disappearance one night sets off a chain of events where "who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind." When the girls are found hanging from a tree, Faleiro shows how their families' search for justice became entangled in some of modern India's most complicated and intractable problems.
Faleiro carefully reconstructs the investigation into the girls' deaths in all its dysfunctional detail, indicting a justice system that was woefully undertrained and unprofessional; a sweeper performed the girls' post-mortems with butcher knives. Conflicts over caste and politics further complicated the investigation, with the apparent truth of the matter coming to light only after dozens of false starts helped wild theories proliferate. While Faleiro has used extensive interviews to portray Padma and Lalli as more than the symbols they became--unearthing their hopes, dreams and familial conflicts in almost novelistic detail--the book is equally valuable as a document of the many complicated, interwoven issues that face India. The truth behind what happened to Padma and Lalli is more banal than it might at first seem, but no less horrific in its implications. The Good Girls is excellent, deeply felt nonfiction. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader