Lost Girls

''This is a fully literary piece of fiction that is not merely entertainment. . . . I don't know what's more seductive about
Lost Girls
, author Andrew Pyper's scabrously witty, darkly musical language or the psychological pull of his plot. . . . He writes so well that his dazzling word work-- reminiscent of Martin Amis's--occasionally draws attention to itself and away from the story. But this is less complaint than compliment. . . . FIRST NOVELIST ANDREW PYPER ISN'T A WRITER WHO'S GOING SOMEWHERE--HE'S ALREADY ARRIVED.''

--
The Boston Globe

''It's rare that a first novel is both brilliantly written and has a solid, carefully threaded plot, but Andrew Pyper pulls it off.
Lost Girls
is a terrifying thriller that successfully weaves small-town ghost tales and murders with a poignant, if creepy, redemption story.''

--
New York Post

''[This] SPELLBINDING debut succeeds on many levels-- as a mystery, a legal thriller, a literary character study. . . . Crane's fundamental character is illuminated--gradually, with the same restrained suspense that makes Pyper's ingeniously tight plotline so compulsively appealing.''

--
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

''EXQUISITE . . . Pyper's writing moves fluidly from moments of caustic wit to moments of striking insight and beauty.''

--
The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)

Please turn the page for more extraordinary acclaim. . . .

''SAVVY, STYLISH, AND VERY ENTERTAINING . . . Pyper's highly successful first novel is a teasing mystery that blossoms into nail-biting courtroom drama, seasoned with a carefully measured spoonful of the supernatural. . . . Pyper quickly builds, and skillfully maintains a full head of increasingly suspenseful steam, and keeps the reader off balance, and hooked, throughout.''

--
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

''This SPLENDID debut mixes murder, brilliant language, sharply observed characters and a plot that draws readers toward psychological complexities.''

--
Minneapolis Star Tribune

''[A] FASCINATING, LAYERED STORY. . . EXCELLENT.''

--
Philadelphia Daily News

''A debut to remember and a real treat for crime-fiction fans . . . [An] extraordinarily mature and fully realized first novel . . . most memorable, though, is the character of narrator Crane, who undergoes one of the most complete yet credible moral metamorphoses in recent fiction.''

--
Booklist
(starred review)

''A CAPTIVATING TALE . . . [Pyper] enriches the story with an elegant writing style and a mood that fits his story perfectly.''

--
The Denver Post

''A POWERFUL DEBUT . . . a spooky psychological thriller with a strangely compelling anti-hero.''

--
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

''BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, CLAUSTROPHOBIC . . . the brooding atmosphere is well maintained.''

--
The Boston Sunday Globe

''An atmospheric work that seems gothic in tone . . . Andrew Pyper's ability to bring his story to life is brilliant and will leave readers clamoring for more.''

--Harriet Klausner,
The Midwest Book Review

''What sets
Lost Girls
apart is its brilliant evocation of place and mood. . . . For readers who relish metaphor with their narrative meat,
Lost Girls
is a rich meal.''

--
Macleans

''EXCEPTIONAL . . . Reads as though it were the secret love child of Alice Munro and Stephen King.''

--
The Montreal Gazette

For Leah

Terrible experience poses the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.

--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Translated by Walter A. Kaufmann

prologue

An afternoon following a day so perfect that people can speak of nothing but how perfect a day it has been. At least these people, sitting in canvas folding chairs on the small cleared beach of a lake in a country where summer is only a brief intermission of winter, watching the sun begin its setting with reverence and sunburned fatigue, making music with the ice in their drinks and feeling that this--ownership of a good place near water and trees and out of sight of neighbors--is more true and real than anything else they could hope for their lives. One of the men rises to tend to the barbecue and the air is filled with the promise of lighting fluid and burning fat. It is not yet dusk but mosquitoes rise from the unmowed grass and drift up into the willow limbs as bats burst out from under the cottage eaves to swallow them. More drinks, more ice--
clinkety-clink
--the rising gush and sweep of a woman's laughter at one of the men's mumbled stories. A feathery lick of wind swirls among them, through their legs, cooling the sweat at their necks. Before them the lake flashes with reflected light but steadily darkens just below the surface, turning the afternoon's clear blue to a purple coagulation of silt and water and weeds--the color of frostbitten lips, of blood left to dry on the blade.

First a girl and then a boy come out through the cottage's screen door and the people by the lake turn to wave lazily up at them, having almost forgotten that they are here as well. The two stand together in bare feet and tans, whispering, the boy telling the girl things about their parents that make her throw her hand to her mouth. He is in his early teens and she a half year younger, but they have known each other and days like this before, time spent behind the backs and under the dining room tables of the grown-ups. Everyone is pleased that the two cousins get along so well and take care of each other so that the adults can imagine themselves, for the time they're all up here, as young and untroubled and childless.

As the man at the barbecue lays the slabs of meat upon the grill, the boy and girl walk down to where the others are sitting and ask if they can take the canoe out for a while before dinner. There's no disagreement from the parents, although one of the women makes a joke about how ''cute'' it is that the two of them have such a ''crush'' on each other, and this starts a mocking whoop from the man who isn't tending the barbecue. They've all been through this routine before. The boy and girl know that this is what their parents like best: drinking a little too much and making remarks about experiences that have passed to a comfortable enough distance that they can now make fun of them, dismiss them even, like first love. So in response they say nothing directly, although the girl mouths
ha ha ha
at her mother to note that the joke stopped being funny a long time ago.

They pull the aluminum canoe out from under the dense scrub of sweet gale and leather-leaf that marks the end of the property and, sharing a look, throw the life jackets back under. Slide the hull down to the beach and over the narrow stretch of pebbly sand which screeches against the metal. The girl is at the front and the boy at the back (or bow and stern, as the boy's father keeps telling him). This is their usual arrangement. The boy is strong and has a practiced J-stroke, which comes in handy when the girl gets tired and he has to bring them in on his own.

''Kissin' cuzzins!'' shouts the barbecue man, who was not in on the earlier joke. The girl's mother looks back at her husband and states his name with exaggerated severity, shaking her head as if to say
He never gets anything!

''What? What?'' the barbecue man asks, shrugging, looking to the other man with a who-can-figure-women? look on his face, and they all laugh again, because for them this is the way men and women are together when things are good.

The girl squeals as her feet sink into the weedy mush that lurks just off from where the sand stops, then steps into her position with two athletic swings of her legs. With a final push the boy kneels in the back and puts fifty feet between the canoe and their parents' laughter in three strokes.

''Wanna go to the island?'' the girl asks. This is the place they usually head for. It has a high granite point rising up out of the tree cover from which you can see almost half of the lake's inlets and jetties. It's also where, at the end of last summer's Labor Day weekend, the two cousins made out for the first time.

''No. Let's go to the beaver dam.''

''That's far.''

''That's far,''
he mimics, which she hates, because he's good at it.

They turn away from the island, which lies a half mile straight ahead of the cottage's beach, and toward the mouth of an unnamed river beyond it.

''I don't want to go home,'' she says without turning.

''What do you mean?''