Author- Gillian Flynn My Rating- 5 STARS Synopsis- Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows, a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming. |
Camille moved away from Wind Gap and became a police reporter in Chicago. Her memories of her hometown, Wind Gap, are more like nightmares. She hates and craves her mother at the same time , who is deeply disturbing throughout the story. She also lost her sister, Marian, who was always a sickly child. Or was she? Camille, through the traumas of her childhood, became a cutter to deal with it. She became obsessed with words and covered her body in them, healed to permanent scars.
Heading back to Wind Gap to get the scoop on a serial killer has her falling back in to old, damaging routines and she begins to put together some horrifying facts about her childhood and how it may connect to the killings. The killer chooses independent, wild children, kills them and removes their teeth. Camille must find out who is doing it, why and what secrets the town is hiding that could be a break in the case.
This books was great. Camille is a likable main character and her voice is so full of pain, needy in a way a child who lacks love begs for it. She is a little messed up, battles with the urge to cut herself daily and drinks heavily to not have to deal with life sober. Part of her was beginning to mend in Chicago but this place holds too much darkness for her. She is flawed. She lies and worries she will become like her mum, but ultimately in her core I think she is kind and smart. She struggles to love herself and allows others to use her. I wanted to hug her tightly and take care of her.
It's a book I wish I could read all over again without knowing how it ends because even right to the last chapter, the story twists and turns again.