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.

I gotta say that this book really surprised me, because it has a disturbing plot as well as disturbing characters and it doesn’t fail to make you feel very uncomfortable while reading it.

I personally didn’t love this book but it was the best thriller book I’ve read last year (2023).

This book took me a very long time to really get into it. Because I found it very hard to like the characters at the beginning and the beginning was all over the place for me personally.

However I find it really hard to write this review because I have very mixed feelings about this book. On one had I know this book is a bestseller and on the other hand the more I think about this book the less I like it.

The writing style in this book was defiantly good when you look at the fact that this book was the debut novel by Gilliam Flynn.

This book involves a lot of dark topics which may trigger some people. Some off the dark topics are self-harm, child abuse, druging children,  sexualization of children, murder of young children amid couple of other things which I can’t say because they will be seen as spoilers.

This entire book is from a journalist perspective who was more or less forced by her employer to return to her own town to investigate the murders of children there. Which I personally found to be very boring.

The big twist at the end, wasn’t truly a twist because we were getting small hints of the ending from the beginning of this book.

The characters in this book were pretty flat and uninteresting. However the main character had some really good moments here and there throughout this book but I found it very hard to like her because she was such a weak character who wasn’t suited to be a crime journalist.

The rest of the characters were almost as flat as the main character. The mother of the main character is an abusive b-word, which really made me hate her a lot.

I Give This Book 2 / 5