Stonkingly good psychological thriller which manages to conceal its damage and its gothic undertones beneath a slick, witty narrative voice, so that what begins as a serial killer chiller turns into a portrait of family at its most malignant.

Camille Preaker is a second-rate reporter at a second-rate Chicago newspaper. After a second girl goes missing in her old hometown of Wind Gap she is sent to investigate and finds herself living with her mother, step-father and half-sister. The second girl turns up dead and Camille and a special investigator from Kansas City begin to peel back a little bit of Wind Gap's facade. Her relationship with her mother brings ugly psychological problems to the surface, many of them tied up with the death of a younger sister twenty years before. But Camille has more scars than she is willing to show, and even as she is deeply troubled by the behaviour of her young half-sister, cracks begin to appear in the surface of her own psyche and she springs more than one shock on the hapless reader before the truth begins to emerge.

A terrifically readable book, for all its shocks and disturbances. It's not terribly gruesome by the standards of this sort of thing, but for what it lacks in blood it makes up for in vomit. Don't let that put you off. After the first thirty pages or so, I couldn't put the book down. Riveting.