Gillian Flynn's first novel, Sharp Objects, may not be quite as twisty as her wildly-popular Gone Girl, but it's definitely full of nasty surprises, perverted motives, and outright evil. Perceptive readers will pick up on part of the secret fairly quickly; others will come, sooner or later, to the same conclusion at which protagonist Camille Preaker reluctantly arrives: You're crazy to think what you're thinking. You're crazy not to think it.
Preaker, a somewhat less than brilliant reporter on a second-class Chicago daily, is sent to her suitably parochial Missouri hometown where the murder of two young girls in less than nine months has townspeople nervous and law enforcement in over their heads. Preaker's editor sees an overlooked story that just might vault his struggling paper into prominence, and thinks the young woman's local connections will help her dig out the details of the investigation. What the editor doesn't understand, and what Preaker is too emotionally fragile to tell him, is that she has been estranged from her family for years, and that being plunged back into the emotional morass of a town where everyone knows â or thinks they know â everyone else's business, is a living nightmare for her.
Flynn has drawn some of the nastiest fictional characters ever to slither around a suspense novel, including a quartet of middle-school girls teetering between sexual promiscuity and mean-girl bullying, a mother figure straight out of hell, and a protagonist with a wheelbarrow full of kinks â sexual and otherwise. It's a horror scenario the reader can barely stand to watch, yet barely manage to put down.
Preaker, a somewhat less than brilliant reporter on a second-class Chicago daily, is sent to her suitably parochial Missouri hometown where the murder of two young girls in less than nine months has townspeople nervous and law enforcement in over their heads. Preaker's editor sees an overlooked story that just might vault his struggling paper into prominence, and thinks the young woman's local connections will help her dig out the details of the investigation. What the editor doesn't understand, and what Preaker is too emotionally fragile to tell him, is that she has been estranged from her family for years, and that being plunged back into the emotional morass of a town where everyone knows â or thinks they know â everyone else's business, is a living nightmare for her.
Flynn has drawn some of the nastiest fictional characters ever to slither around a suspense novel, including a quartet of middle-school girls teetering between sexual promiscuity and mean-girl bullying, a mother figure straight out of hell, and a protagonist with a wheelbarrow full of kinks â sexual and otherwise. It's a horror scenario the reader can barely stand to watch, yet barely manage to put down.
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