Karin Slaughter (http://www.karinslaughter.com/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Slaughter) is a pretty useful name to have for a girl who writes crime fiction. She has sold 30 million copies of her gripping psychological crime fiction and is published in 32 languages. Slaughter is a passionate defender of public libraries against the philistines who are ignoring them and running them down (http://savethelibraries.com/) Pretty Girls is the title of her latest, 2015, novel. The summary is as follows. It has been more than twenty years that Claire and Lydia’s teenaged sister, Julia, vanished without a trace. The two women have not spoken since, and now their lives could not be more different. Claire is the glamorous trophy wife of an Atlanta millionaire. Lydia, a single mother, dates an ex-con and struggles to make ends meet. But neither has recovered from the horror and heartbreak of their shared loss – a devastating wound that is cruelly ripped open when Claire’s husband is killed. Is there, though, a connection between the disappearance of a teenage girl and the murder of a middle-aged man, almost a quarter-century apart? Forming a wary truce, the surviving sisters look to the past to find the truth, unearthing the secrets that destroyed their family all those years ago . . . and uncovering the possibility of redemption, and revenge, where they least expect it. If you fancy a chilling psychological thrill in the dog days of a soggy summer, get your hands on Pretty Girls.
Enquire at your local library, or consult http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pretty-Girls-Novel-Karin-Slaughter/dp/1780893558/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439014944&sr=8-1&keywords=pretty+girls for full bibliographic details.
544 pages in Century Books
First published 02 July 2015
ISBN 978-1780893556
Karin Slaughter