Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

 

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

I do like this author.  She is fresh and imaginative in her stories and writing style.  This is her first book before the overhyped Gone Girl came out.  

It is of a similar style to Gone Girl where the story builds up bit by bit and you learn new details about the characters in small ways that help the story build and progress.  It takes about a third of the book to actually get absorbed in it but this is down to the style as you cannot get into the characters until she reveals just the right amount of information about them - again very similar to the build up in Gone Girl.

I did guess the two "twists" that came towards the end but this did not lessen my enjoyment of the story as I was intrigued to see how they would be handled.

My criticism is about the end.  It all felt rather rushed and sometimes convenient.  I wanted the end to be written in a lot more detail and, after thinking about it for a while, I would have loved a full flashback section about life in the Preaker home when Marian was still alive and perhaps more detail about Camille's future at the end.  

I think an author with more experience would have made this a fantastic must read novel instead of the good, read if you can novel.  4 out of 5 from me and certainly an author I will enjoy reading in the future.