The Girls She Left Behind

November 16, 2015
Graves’s dark second Lizzie Snow mystery (after 2015’s Winter at the Door) examines the ugly, soul-destroying things that mark the aftermath of a child abduction. At age 15, Jane Crimmins is kidnapped from a party in a New Haven, Conn., park, along with her 15-year-old cousin, Cam Petry. Jane escapes soon afterward, but she tells no one of her experience or that three other victims remain in captivity. Fifteen years later, the police arrest Jane’s abductor and rescue three young women, including Cam, from his New Haven house. Now Jane lives in terror that someone will find out what she did—and didn’t—do. Jane retreats to Bearkill, Maine, where Lizzie, a sheriff’s deputy, hopes against hope to find her niece, missing since her sister’s murder eight years before. A tough cookie, Lizzie can’t resist getting involved in the case of another missing girl, whose mother is less than forthcoming. Meanwhile, a fire raging in the nearby woods serves as an objective correlative of the case, burning all who touch it. Agent: Jane Rotrosen, Jane Rotrosen Literary Agency.