Darling Girls by Sally Hepworth

Hello everyone.  I hope you are having a great day.

Have you ever gone back to some place you liked as a child, only to discover that it has been torn down?  When we went on our disastrous New England trip I was telling you about, we went through the Catskills. The Catskills is a mountainous area in New York.  It used to have huge, all-inclusive resorts.  It is what the movie Dirty Dancing is based on.  I was so fortunate as a kid to go to the largest, best, most famous of them all...The Concord. My husband grew up at the oceanfront in the south.  I know, don't give me "the look," I know it is sickening. He grew up working in hotels, renting bikes, you know...beachy things...as his jobs while in high school.  I worked at Kmart. I've griped about this before, but my jealousy still exists.  Anyway, the point is, growing up in a tourist area with a hospitality background, the Catskill resorts are right up his alley.  Too bad they're all gone. Yep, airplanes became popular and vacations in the mountains went out of favor.  Why go play tennis in the mountains when you can fly to some tropical island or Europe? I get it, I really do. Still...it was hard to see that era end.  It was something magical, something unique. The Concord was still whole and open when we got married.  We could have gone there for a few days instead of the train station in Scranton Pennsylvania. It never crossed my mind.  Now it is torn down and I'll always regret not showing hubby something so iconic.  We drove by where it was, and actually got out of the car to stretch our legs and take it all in.  It was spooky.  It had been so massive, so vibrant.  Now it is a lot of grassless dirt. It is quiet and still. The world-famous comedians long gone, no more George Burns, Jerry Lewis, Jerry Seinfeld. There was a hole where the pool used to be, but nobody was there playing Simon Says.  The sweeping stairs in the lobby, the massive dining room, the indoor ice rink, the hall with huge marble slab floor, the dozens of tennis courts, and thousands of hotel rooms, all gone. No screaming kids, no men in white shoes, no bellmen.  Quiet. Still. Gone.  While only seen in home movies and photos for hubby, for me...I could still faintly hear it. It was like one of those memories that you can kind of remember but can't get a good hold on it.  Sometimes, despite having loved a place, the negative space of it can be creepy and unnerving.

I recently read Darling Girls by Sally Hepworth.  It is my sixth book by this author. I keep coming back for a reason. This author consistently delivers great stories. This time we are following women who grew up together in foster care with a less than ideal caregiver. They are contacted by a detective from the town where they suffered their childhood, to discover that the house in which they lived was torn down and beneath it a body was found. Who was the deceased, when and how did they die? All things this book sets out to discover. While told in each person's voice in current and past timelines, it could have been confusing, but it wasn't. Hepworth is masterful at blending all the hard edges together, making the reading seamless and pleasurable. This book has multiple twists to keep the pages turning, right down to a spectacular ending. First, I was scratching my head, I couldn't figure out what I had just read. Then I realized despite reading mostly thrillers that this author had once again beat my skills at figuring things out. Brilliant and diabolical at the same time. Loved it. 

A huge thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for giving me this advanced copy for review. My views are given freely...my family would say "way too freely!"