A llthe Missing Girls”People slipping away right before your eyes”: It happened ten years ago and now it has happened again. In this slow-burning, suspenseful tale another girl has gone missing in the small southern town of Cooley Ridge, and Nic Farrell has been drawn back to a place she thought she had long ago left behind. In order to work out what’s going on, we have to “go back in time”, a recapturing of the past embodied in the novel’s intricate structure, with the central chapters in reverse chronological order. As we move backwards, we come gradually to understand how things have, over the years, slipped away, faded and disappeared – girls, identities, memories, grainy photographs, once-familiar paths through the woods. The mysterious events of the novel keep us guessing to the end. Disappearances are ultimately explained, but at the same time we become increasingly attuned to the narrator’s sense that parts of herself are also missing, perhaps irretrievably: her own lost self is one of the things she is trying to discover, and there are so many “different versions of me”. Is Nic’s lost self innocent or guilty? Will her quest bring closure or will she one day “walk through the woods, fade to nothing”? A teasing, compelling, thoughtful and very cleverly plotted novel.
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