Mirkat Always Reading

Camille Preaker, cub reporter on the crime beat of a minor Chicago newspaper, is reluctant to accept the assignment when her editor sends her back to her hometown, Wind Gap, MO, to investigate the death of two pre-teen girls within a nine-month period.  Wind Gap is one of those small towns where everyone seems to know everyone else just a little too well, and it does not help that her misnamed mother Adora seems to take it as a personal affront that her daughter be doing something so gruesome as reporting on brutal crimes.  Although Adora insists that Camille stay at the family home, she also is clearly eager to know when the visit will end so "we can make plans of our own."  Her stepfather Alan is little more than a distant stranger, and her mean-girl half sister, precocious 13-year-old Amma, is straight-up strange: sugar-sweet one moment and scary the next.  Both sisters live in the shadow of Adora's second-born daughter Marion, who died at age 12, when Camille was 13.

This is the third installment of my three-book Gillian Flynn binge.  Something about her books makes me want to crawl into them and not come out until I'm done.  The ultimate conclusion came as a bit of a sucker punch, and I mean that as a compliment.  I especially recommend this to anyone who has already enjoyed Flynn's writing.