Girl, 11 is a crime novel about a serial killer who, twenty years before the book opens, murdered a number of women and girls without ever being caught. A methodical person with an obsession with numbers, the killer picks up young woman in descending age, keeps them for a period and then deposits their bodies for the authorities to find and their broken families to mourn. Most people believe the killer died in a catastrophic fire which also destroyed the body of the last girl he took.
True Crime podcaster, Elle, has long been fascinated by the TCK (the Countdown Killer), so when she starts to release a weekly podcast featuring a new angle on the investigation and interviews with the retired chief investigator, medical people, bereaved parents, it quickly becomes popular. But popularity isn’t necessarily a good thing and attract numerous trolls and personal threats as well. Yet, it seems as if Elle is on the cusp of learning the identity of TCK and, when someone about to give her crucial information is killed, she’s convinced the murderer has surfaced again.
Understanding how obsessed Elle is, there are those even very close to her that believe she’s allowing this to overtake her reason, putting herself and others in terrible danger. When someone close to Elle is kidnapped, she no longer knows whether she can trust her instincts. Is the killer back? Is it a copycat? Or is she torturing herself for other more personal reasons or worse, for none at all?
A clever, well-plotted book that segues between the first-person transcripts of the podcasts and third-person flashbacks and present day accounts, it’s a story of trauma, grief, incredible resilience and trust.
A fabulous, fast-paced read that will keep the blood pumping into the wee hours.
When Christian White appeared on ABC breakfast to discuss his debut novel, The Nowhere Child, I was immediately struck by not only his humbleness, but about how he spoke about the craft of writing. Then, of course, there was the summary he gave of his novel. I confess, I was hooked, and wasted no time downloading The Nowhere Child, anticipating with no small degree of excitement what I might discover (another great novelist and tale).
The fourth book in the really exciting Breakthrough Series, Ripple keeps the pace fast, the plot tight and the action going. In this book, the specially formed group overseen by Admiral Langford and operating under the radar are dispersed across oceans and continents, trying to unravel secrets left beneath the waves eons ago, and searching for another source of the remarkable biological entity they earlier found and which the Chinese and Russians sought to possess at any cost. An entity which can change the course of humanity’s future while at the same time throwing the past into question.
