Sharp Objects

Camille Preaker writes for a minor Chicago paper and has spent years keeping her distance from Wind Gap, the small town in southern Missouri where she grew up. When a girl from the town is found dead and another vanishes, her editor sends her home to get the story. The police are guarded, the locals are suspicious, and nobody wants a reporter asking questions.

Camille stays in the large Victorian house where her mother, Adora, lives with her second husband and Amma, Camille's thirteen-year-old half-sister. Adora is elegant, admired and icy toward her older daughter. Amma behaves like a sweet child at home and like the ruler of the town's teenagers outside it. As Camille interviews grieving families and works with a detective sent from Kansas City, she drinks too much, sleeps too little and faces painful memories of her own adolescence, including the loss of a younger sister long ago. The closer she gets to the truth about the killings, the more it points back toward the house itself.

Dark and intense rather than graphic, with a heroine carrying old wounds. About 254 pages. Adapted as an HBO limited series starring Amy Adams.