HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL

A nonbinary teen is haunted by their father’s serial killer past.

The impact on Sid Atkinson of having a father in prison for being a serial killer has been crushing. Sid has changed their last name, lives with Gram in a trailer, and is visited by the ghosts of the five teenaged girls Dad murdered so gruesomely. Ten years after the first victim was killed, June Hargrove’s body is found in the same lake as those of her predecessors. Sid knows their father didn’t do it—he’s serving time in prison—but the coincidence is triggering. As the body count ratchets up, and the patterns start to mirror their father’s crimes, it becomes clear to Sid that a copycat is at work. Sid is willing to go to great lengths to discover who’s murdering the teenage girls of Cardinal Creek, even going to see their father in prison for the first time in two years. Sid finds space, amid this recurring horror, to entertain a budding romance with mysterious new girl Mavis Hastings. But as Sid gets closer to the truth, their fear becomes conflated with the whispers of the ghosts, and people close to them end up in just as much danger as Sid is. This story moves at a fast pace, one so fast that Sid’s inner turmoil—and quite possibly, the attention to their mental health—gets short shrift. Most characters are cued white.

An absorbing, plot-driven, skin-crawling thriller.