The Wicked Girls

The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood   378 pages

One fateful summer morning in 1986, two 11-year-old girls meet for the first time and by the end of the day, they are charged with murder.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kirsty Lindsay is reporting on a series of attacks on young female tourists in a seaside town when her investigation leads her to interview funfair cleaner Amber Gordon. For Kirsty and Amber, it's the first time they've seen each other since that dark day when they were just children. But with new lives - and families - to protect, will they really be able to keep their secret hidden?

The Wicked Girls has a twisting plot and a range of secondary characters, each bringing up other issues that add to the depth of the story, from Amber's emotionally manipulative boyfriend to Kirsty's struggles to support their family with her husband "excessed" out of a job in his mid-40s, from the minimum wage workers at the amusement park to the media, which just like twenty-five years ago, seizes on lurid details and interviews with unreliable people to construct a narrative that will sell papers and generate moral outrage, whether or not it actually bears any resemblance to the truth.

Watching two women whose lives were destroyed as children try to reconstruct an existence under the constant fear of discovery, even by their own families, and then see it all come unraveled once again, makes this book both a suspenseful psychological thriller and a tragedy even before the climax. This book is for people drawn to crime thrillers - real and fiction, but also for students of human psychology because the content should make you question preconceived notions of guilt and innocence, of rehabilitation and retribution.

Posted By:   Regina C.