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A search & rescue expert. A kidnapped woman. The lost girls who haunt them both.
There is a girl in a basement.
The door has stopped opening.
The light is gone.
Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?
Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there's always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town's most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.
Kate Alice Marshall, bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, is back with the thrilling new novel Ashley Winstead calls, "magnetic, shocking, heartbreaking, and unputdownable."
"A superb mystery...Marshall takes a familiar premise and pushes it into exciting, experimental directions...Readers will be thinking about this long after they turn the last page." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[M]uddled, confusing reading... Recommended only for die-hard Marshall fans." —Kirkus Reviews
"A smart and layered mystery with complex characters, a unique structure, and the ultimate in a creepy locked room setting. With its shocking twists and stunning final reveal The Girls Before is the ultimate page-turner." ―Robyn Harding, bestselling author of The Drowning Woman
"Kate Alice Marshall is one of the best thriller writers working today, and The Girls Before might be her best book yet. Marshall writes haunting poetry about the darkest sins imaginable, gossamer webs made of stygian threads, each story unfolding like a seductive melody sung by a woman in the woods, irresistible as it lures you deeper. The Girls Before is magnetic, shocking, heartbreaking, and unputdownable. What a gift to read her work." ―Ashley Winstead, bestselling author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife
This information about The Girls Before was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kate Alice Marshall is the USA Today bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, A Killing Cold, and multiple novels for younger readers. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
If you liked The Girls Before, try these:
by Kate Alice. Marshall
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