The Wicked Girls: A Novel

The Edgar Award-winning psychological thriller that asks the question: How well can you know anyone?

On a fateful summer morning in 1986, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time. By the end of the day, they will both be charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, journalist Kirsty Lindsay is reporting on a series of sickening attacks on young female tourists in a seaside vacation town when her investigation leads her to interview carnival cleaner Amber Gordon. For Kirsty and Amber, it’s the first time they’ve seen each other since that dark day so many years ago. Now with new, vastly different lives—and unknowing families to protect—will they really be able to keep their wicked secret hidden?

Gripping and fast-paced, with an ending that will stay with you long after you’ve read it, The Wicked Girls will appeal to fans of the Academy Award–nominated film Heavenly Creatures and the novels of Rosamund Lupton and Chevy Stevens.

From BooklistStarred Review Convicted of murdering a 4-year-old girl when they were 11, Jade and Bel spent the rest of their youth in two separate British correctional facilities. Upon their release as adults, they are given new names and the probationary condition that they never have contact again. But a series of murders in the struggling seaside town of Whitmouth brings renamed journalist Kirsty Lindsay face to face with the woman now known as Amber Gordon, a janitor at Funnland, where the latest body has been found. The two again find themselves connected over a violent crime. Marwood, the pseudonym of a British journalist, intersperses the contemporary serial-killer story line and hour-by-hour accounts of what happened the day the girls met and killed a preschooler. This chilling debut is chock-full of surprises. If Tana French and Gillian Flynn stayed up all night telling stories at an abandoned amusement park, this is awfully close to what they might come up with. --Karen Keefe

ReviewGenuinely disturbing and emotionally unsettling, The Wicked Girls is irresistible Val McDermid Having read it and devoured every page, I really wish I'd written it! It was cleverly plotted and pacy, with all the storylines thundering towards a final, gripping conclusion. I loved it Elizabeth Haynes The best thriller I've read since Sister. Taut, gritty and utterly compelling Lisa Jewell A psychological thriller which just jumps off the page, grabs you and takes you on a roller-coaster ride of emotions Bookseller