Last Girl Gone

Book excerpt: “Your new favorite procedural.” —Bustle This “diabolical debut thriller” for fans of Julia Keller and David Bell “offers more twists than a winding country road” (New York Journal of Books). A disgraced journalist gets the story of a lifetime when a parents’ worst nightmare comes to life in her North Carolina hometown . . . Investigative journalist Laura Chambers is back in her tiny hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina, the one place she swore never to return. Fired from the Boston Globe and with her career in shambles, she reluctantly takes a job with the local paper. The work is simple, unimportant, and worst of all, boring—at least until a missing girl turns up dead, the body impeccably clean, dressed to be the picture of innocence. Years earlier, 10-year-old Patty Finch left home and never made it back. But for the people of Hillsborough, Patty was just the beginning. Child after child disappeared, a reign of terror the town desperately wants to forget. Now that terror has returned to seize another girl. And another. And another. This is the story Laura’s been waiting for—her one last chance to get back onto the front page. She dives deeper into a case that runs colder by the second, only to discover the truth may be far closer to home than she could have ever imagined. Powerful, intricate, and tense, Last Girl Gone will have you looking over your shoulder long after the last page.