The Wicked Girls

May 13, 2013
A rundown British seaside amusement park, Funnland, provides the backdrop for the pseudonymous Marwood’s memorable first novel. Thanks to U.K. rehab policies, impoverished Jade Walker and neglected Bel Oldacre—accused, arrested, and sentenced as 11-year-olds for murdering a six-year-old girl in 1986—have become in 2011 Kirsty Lindsay, a newspaper stringer with an out-of-work husband, and Amber Gordon, a big-hearted Funnland cleaner, living with a handsome, enigmatic man given to black moods. Though the law forbids the two to meet, Amber’s discovery of a teenage girl’s body—the third local murder that year—in Innfinnity, the park’s creepy hall of mirrors, and Kirsty’s assignment to get the story behind the killings bring them together again. Marwood fills this disturbing thriller with sordid red herrings and brutal reflections of lower- and middle-class economic hardships, grinding in the sadly familiar message that societal injustice cruelly distorts women’s lives.

Starred review from July 1, 2013
Marwood's chilling tale of two girls involved in the death of a small child and the resulting impact that act has on them is absorbing, plausible and unsettling. After circumstances throw Bel, the unwanted stepdaughter of a wealthy man, and Jade, the child of an outcast pig farmer, together, the two 11-year-olds find themselves on a destructive path that eventually reunites them more than two decades after the terrible deed that branded them as child killers. Hated and scorned by the public, vilified by the press, the two women are given new identities when they are released from custody and instructed never again to have contact with each other. Now they are Kirsty, a respectable freelance journalist with a husband and two children, and Amber, the manager of an amusement park in a slightly shabby seaside town. After a string of young women are murdered there, Kirsty travels to the town to cover the killings for one of her clients, eventually stumbling across Amber. It doesn't take long for them to realize how they know one another, and despite the order to remain apart, they soon find their paths intersecting with a deadly certainty. Marwood, a journalist writing under a pseudonym, constructs a tightly woven story that exposes the seamier side of human nature and the devastating circumstances that interwove the lives of these two women. Riveting from first page to last, this book unfolds by building on the unexpected. The author skillfully manages to populate the story with evil characters without ever going over the top, making the women sympathetic to the reader and keeping the suspense alive throughout. A suspenseful, buzz-worthy novel offering a sure-footed depiction of two women who lost their childhoods.

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Starred review from July 1, 2013

Marwood's riveting debut novel explores how a single act of violence committed by two 11-year-old girls not only shadows the rest of their lives but also connects them to a series of killings at a seaside vacation community years later. It's been 25 years since Jade Walker and Annabel Oldacre were convicted of murder, and their lives have taken dramatically different turns. Jade, now known as Kirsty, is a journalist with a dedicated husband and two children. Bel, now called Amber, supervises the evening cleaning shift at an amusement park on the boardwalk in Whitmouth. When young women begin to turn up dead in Whitmouth, Kirsty and Amber reconnect by chance. The rash of killings threatens to expose their carefully guarded secrets--and for one of them, these new murders hit very close to home. VERDICT Marwood has written a terrific thriller, full of dark turns and dread, and the twisty ending will stick with readers long after they finish the book. Fans of intelligent page-turners by such authors as Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn will snatch this one up. [This title is a 2013 Thriller Award nominee for Best Paperback Original Novel.--Ed.]--Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins

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