Sharp Objects: Soon to be an HBO & Sky Atlantic Limited Series starring Amy Adams - Hardcover

Flynn, Gillian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297851527 ISBN 13: 9780297851523

Publisher: W&N, 2007

Synopsis

When two girls, aged nine and ten are abducted and killed in Wind Gap, Missouri, Camille Preaker is sent back to her home town to investigate and report on the crimes. Camille, self-described 'white trash from old money', is the daughter of one of the richest families in town. Long-haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged from her mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed once again in her family's Victorian mansion, reacquainting herself with her distant mother and the half-sister she barely knows, a precocious 13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town and surrounds herself with a group of vampish teenage girls. As Camille struggles to remain detached from the evidence, her relationship with her neurotic, hypochondriac mother threatens to topple her hard-won mental stability. Working alongside the police chief and a special agent from out of town, Camille tries to uncover the mystery of who killed these little girls and why. But there are deeper psychological puzzles: Why does Camille identify so strongly with the dead girls? And how is this connected to the death of another sister years earlier?

About this title

Review

Gillian Flynn is TV critic for US magazine Entertainment Weekly, but after the highly impressive thriller debut that is Sharp Objects, she may have to re-think the day job – particularly as such masters of the thriller as Harlan Coben and Stephen King are falling over each other to praise her novel.

Flynn’s conflicted heroine is journalist Camille Parker, who is holding down a job on a low-rent newspaper, convinced that she’s inspiring only feeling of disappointment in her editor, who has nursed unfulfilled hopes for her journalistic career. Camille, from a small town called Wind Gap in Missouri, sees herself as white trash, but actually hails from a moneyed family. To maintain her sanity, she has escaped from the town and her highly-strung, hypochondriac mother. But bad news beckons: she is summoned by her editor, who suggests she return to her home town to cover the abduction and murder of two young girls. Despite all her reservations (not least for her own mental equilibrium), she feels she must go, returning to the impressive Victorian mansion that was her home. She is quickly back in dangerous territory with her demanding mother – and reminding herself how she fell into a dark cycle of self-harm. Another problem is her Lolita-ish half-sister, a precocious teenager with a following of alienated girlfriends and some dark secrets of her own. Back in this destabilising territory, Camille is reminded of the childhood tragedy that left a mark on her. Looking into the deaths of the murdered girls, she starts to make big mistakes: going to bed with the investigator assigned to the case, and, worse, getting involved with the prime suspect, a disturbed teenager.

This heady brew of Southern gothic is dispatched with an assurance that totally belies the fact that this is a debut novel – and, what’s more, will have most readers hungry for more of Gillian Flynn’s individual brand of sexually-charged menace. --Barry Forshaw

Review

To say this is a terrific debut novel is really too mild ... [it is] a relentlessly creepy family saga. I found myself dreading the last thirty pages or so, but was helpless to stop turning them. Then, after the lights were out, the story just stayed there in my head, coiled and hissing, like a snake in a cave (Stephen King)

This is a stylish thriller about housewives who don't recognise their own desperations, while the reader recognises with fascinated clarity the nastiness and vacuity of life in an updated Stepford (Literary Review)

It is a stunningly accomplished evocation of the oppressiveness of small-town life and is just as assured in depicting the gradually revealed psychological disorder that links Camille to both the killer and victims (Sunday Times)

Compulsively disturbing and ... exciting (Time Out)

[A] striking first novel ... a relentlessly dark tale, with some very disturbing characters, Camille among then, and it makes a powerful impact (Sunday Telegraph)

A stylish and compelling debut. A real winner (Harlan Coben)

If you love Martha O'Connor look out for Gillian Flynn's debut, Sharp Objects ... a gothic fairytale-gone-bad (Company)

The horror creeps up slowly, with Flynn misdirecting the reader until the shocking, dreadful and memorable double ending (Publisher's Weekly)

'Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women's lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over. Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.' (Starred Kirkus Review)

This impressive debut novel is fuelled by stylish writing and compelling portraits of desperate housewives, southern style... In a particularly seductive narrative style, Flynn adopts the cynical, knowing patter of a weary reporter, but it is her portraits of the town¿s backstabbing, social-climbing, bored, and bitchy females that provoke her sharpest and most entertaining writing. A stylish turn on dark crimes and even darker psyches. (Booklist)

Edition details

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0297851527
• ISBN 13: 9780297851523
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272