Karin Slaughter
Pretty Girls, (2015)
Plot summary
Twenty-four years ago, Claire and Lydia Carroll’s elder sister Julia, 19, vanished without a trace after a night out with friends. The family was devastated, each dealing with the tragedy in a different way.
Julia’s mother Helen tried to rebuild her life for the sake of her other daughters but dad Sam, who kept a diary in the form of a letter to his missing daughter, never moved on and never stopped looking.
The two sisters had a spectacular falling out and have not spoken since, and now their lives could not be more different. Claire is the glamorous wife of Atlanta architect and millionaire Paul Scott. Lydia is a single mother, a former cocaine addict, dates an ex-convict and struggles to make ends meet.
Both Claire and Lydia have never recovered from the horror and heartbreak of their shared loss, a lingering wound that is ripped open when another teenage girl goes missing in Atlanta.
Days later, Claire’s husband is murdered and she is left to pick up the pieces of her life. But when she makes a shocking discovery, her mother’s warning that ‘knowing the truth wasn’t always a good thing’ turns out to be more dangerous than she could ever have imagined…