The girls before by Kate Alice Marshall

After reading We won't all survive, by Kate Alice Marshall, I couldn’t resist picking up The girls before, a chilling thriller.

There is a girl in a basement.
The door has stopped opening.
The light is gone.

The novel begins with a nightmare scenario titled 'Below', of a girl chained in a basement with only the ghosts of the girls before to keep her company. The next chapter, titled 'Above', introduces Audrey, a search and rescue expert, looking for a missing child, who is rescued by other volunteers. She believes in her inner voice which tells her to find missing people and this time she hears that voice in the forest. She is convinced that a missing girl might be there somewhere and she is determined to find her, just as she is determined to find Janie, her best friend who disappeared when they were teenagers. After just two chapters the reader is drawn in, desperate to find out the fate of the girl in the basement, wondering whether Audrey will ever find her missing friend or the runaway schoolgirl. As the novel progresses Audrey discovers that other girls have disappeared in the past and have never been seen again. When she raises this with the Sheriff, he discounts her theory, forbidding her to search the forest because it belongs to the powerful local family who forbid trespassers. But Audrey is on a mission that she cannot let go, even though her friends advise her to leave it.

The Girls Before has a very complex plot with multiple twists and turns, and the thought of a girl trapped in a basement, waiting to die, is not for the faint hearted. A legend about a local witch called Red Hands who takes vengeance on abusive men adds to the intensity of the story, while a pitbull named Barry who can scent death provides some lighter moments when he demands tummy rubs instead of growling. The narrative goes from past to present, above ground and below ground, and the reader needs to be constantly aware of what is going on and I had to read the last chapters a few times to work out what happened - it's always good when an author keeps you in the dark!

The Girls Before is an engrossing but disturbing story and I would recommend it for a more mature audience than some of Marshall’s previous young adult novels.

Themes: Murder, Thriller, Missing people, Rescue work.

Pat Pledger