Just Jennifer

The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood (Penguin, July 30 2013)

Engrossing and disturbing, The Wicked Girls explores the lives of two women convicted of murder as eleven-year-olds who appear to have gotten away from the events of their childhood until the day the two meet again as a serial-killer stalks young women in a seaside town.  Bel and Jade meet for the first time when they are eleven but become tied together forever when they murder, and attempt to cover it up, the young sister of a friend of one of their older brothers.  Convicted, but separated during their time they served at their sentences, new identities were created for the notorious pre-teens and they have tried to put their pasts behind them: Jade has become Kristy, a newspaper reporter who has a loving husband and two children; Bel is now Amber, a night-shift cleaning supervisor at an amusement park with an abusive common-law husband and little hope for her future.  Bel stumbles upon a dead woman in the house of horrors and Kristy comes to report on the serial murders, putting the two on a collision course that will force them to remember the past and creates circumstances that will make their futures as uncertain as they once were.  The original crime is revealed slowly as flashbacks, leading up to the inevitable meeting of these two women who must resolve their past issues if they hope to move on with the future.  While tracking down a serial killer makes this book part mystery, the moodiness of the narrative and the focus on the two women and how their past and choices since have affected their lives takes the book, a hit in the UK into the realm of psychological suspense.