The Lake of Lost Girls

In 1998, women are disappearing around Southern State University in Mt. Randall, North Carolina. One of them is freshman Jessica Fadley, whose life was coming apart in ways her family did not see.

Twenty-four years later, her sister Lindsey is still looking. A popular true-crime podcast takes up the cold case, and the publicity gives Lindsey both leverage and a problem: everyone who knew Jessica is suddenly a character in someone else's entertainment. Then the bodies of the missing women begin turning up in a lake outside town, and the story stops being cold.

Katherine Greene braids Lindsey's present-day search with Jessica's final months, interleaving podcast transcripts, message-board posts, and press clippings — a mystery about a decades-old campus predator and about what the true-crime industry does to the people it feeds on.