The Girls Before

From the bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, comes a new novel about a search and rescue expert, a kidnapped woman, and the lost girls who haunt them both.

There is a girl in a basement. The door has stopped opening. The light is gone.

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?

Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there's always another one lost.

When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town's most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

Praise for Kate Alice Marshall:

'Unexpected plot twists, deep psychological perspicacity, and an endlessly interesting dance between past and present that evokes the dread and intensity of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects.' - New York Times Book Review

'A propulsive and intricate psychological thriller.' - Kirkus

'Utterly riveting . . . A stunner - dark, unflinching, and as twisty and sharp as a tangle of thorns.' - Riley Sager