Lost Girls - Hardcover

Pyper, Andrew.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333786025 ISBN 13: 9780333786024

Publisher: Macmillan, 2000

Synopsis

When hotshot lawyer Bartholomew Crane is despathced to a lakeside town in northern Ontario with a brief to defend a schoolteacher accused of murdering two teenaged girls, he assumes it will be an open-and-shut case. However, he finds both teacher's and town's past are not all as they first appear.

About this title

Review

Bartholomew Crane's first murder trial ought to be an easy win for the young, arrogant Toronto lawyer. The bodies of two missing teenagers--the Lost Girls--have never been found, and there's slight forensic evidence to tie the chief suspect, a high school English teacher, to their disappearance. Dispatched to the Canadian north woods to defend Thomas Tripp against a murder charge, Crane packs his omnipresent flask of cocaine and begins preparing to demolish the Crown's flimsy, highly circumstantial case. Crane doesn't care whether Tripp is guilty; his only job is to get him off. But Crane's client won't co-operate in his own defence, and the citizens of the small, depressed town are clamouring for his conviction.

Within days, Crane's waking and sleeping hours are haunted by odd occurrences: the disturbing apparitions of a madwoman who drowned in the same mist-shrouded lake where Tripp is assumed to have disposed of his victims; the incessant ringing of a telephone down the empty hallway of his motel; the bizarre tale of a 100-year-old murder told by an elderly woman whose own daughter was claimed by the legendary Lady of Lake St. Christopher. In short order, the facts and surmises of the case become intertwined with Crane's visions and nightmares, and what had seemed like a straightforward, easily defended case based on wrongful accusation becomes a morality play in which the protagonist himself must answer for events that occurred 20 years ago.

A brooding, moody novel as dark as its setting, Lost Girls is less a courtroom drama than a ghost story hinged on a thin plot. Crane is not a particularly likable or sympathetic character, and Pyper's attempts at creating atmosphere favour the "It was a dark and stormy night" school of genre writing. But fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul will find this a chilly enough read to occupy just that kind of evening. --Jane Adams, Amazon.com

About the Author

Andrew Pyper was born and raised in Stratford, Ontario. He received an undergraduate and master's degree in English literature from McGill University in Montreal, as well as a law degree from the University of Toronto.  His collection of stories, Kiss Me, released only in Canada, was hailed "an astonishing piece of work" by The Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto. Lost Girls is his first novel.

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0333786025
• ISBN 13: 9780333786024
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351