Missing Girls
Two recent books describe the trauma
families go through when a child goes missing. It is worse when it’s a
daughter, because of the horrible sexual assaults girls can be subjected to.
Sometimes parents wish they get news of the child’s death, so at least they can
grieve and find closure.
Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls is so horrifying that you
can’t believe that a female writer thought up all those tortures on young women.
When nineteen-year-old Julia Carroll
disappeared, her family fell apart. Her father, Sam, made it a mission to find
out what happened to her, when the cops gave up. His obsession destroyed his marriage and led
to his suicide. The mother Helen Carroll kept Julia’s room as she left it, in
the hope that she would return. Every time a girl goes missing, the Carroll’s
relive the trauma again.
One of the sisters, Lydia Delgado, a
single mother, went into a downward spiral of self-destructive behavior. The
only who remained remained relatively unscathed was another sister, Clair
Scott, who had a happy marriage to architect Paul Scott. She is estranged from
Lydia, who, in the past, accused Paul of molesting her.
Then, one evening Paul is murdered by
muggers in the presence of his wife. When Claire starts looking into Paul’s
things in his ‘man cave’ she discovers a bunch of snuff porn videos, that are
so brutal that she is convinced by the investigating cop that they are staged
for the sick pleasure of perverts.
She finds that her rich
and outwardly caring husband had a secret side to him and she is devastated.
The only person she can trust is Lydia, whom she hasn’t spoken to twenty years.
Together they pick at the thread that could unravel the mystery of the missing
girls, Paul’s involvement, and hopefully find out what really happened to their
sister. They put themselves in danger, because the men involved are very
powerful and would stop at nothing to prevent being exposed for their crimes.
The scenes of torture and killing are
so graphic that they are enough to cause nightmares, and make one wonder about
a society that breeds such beasts in the guise of men.
Pretty Girls
By Karin Slaugter
Published by William Morrow
Pages: 400
*****************
Flora Dane is a carefree student on a
summer break in Florida when she is kidnapped by a sexual predator. It is unimaginable that any human being could do to another
what the man subjects the young girl to. She is locked up in a coffin, starved,
beaten and raped; then the man gives her food and water, turning Flora into a
frightening case of Stockholm Syndrome. She feels so debased by this experience
and convinced that her family has given her up for dead, that she does not
escape even when she can. Her abductor breaks her down completely, mentally and
physically, till she is like a puppet controlled by him. It takes superhuman
will to survive this ordeal for 472 days, and after she is rescued, she becomes
a different person—fearless and hardened. What could possibly happen to her
that is worse than what she already suffered? Her mother and brother put their
lives on hold, hoping against hope that she would turn up alive, but the girl
who was returned to them was just a shell of her former self.
Lisa Gardner’s
disturbing thriller, Flora becomes a self-styled vigilante—deliberately putting
herself into situations that would attract monsters like her captor, and she fights them. The last man was preyed
on her, ended up burnt to death. A female cop, DD Warren in charge of the case
– this is Gardner’s eighth Warren book—is caught in a bind. Can a murderer who
deliberately posed as a victim be pardoned for her crime? Does her past agony
give her license to kill?
Then, much to the shock
of Warren and Samuel Keynes, FBI’s victim counselor who had helped Flora come
out of her trauma, she is kidnapped again. And this time the abductor is even
more cruel.
It is much more frightening to read Find Her than any horror story. Flora
evokes equal parts admiration and dread. But the same question can be posed
again—what kind of society creates such fiends?
Find Her
By Lisa Gardner
Published by Dutton
Pages: 416
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