More than twenty years ago, the disappearance of teenage Julia shattered her family and drove her two sisters apart. Today Claire is the pampered wife of a wealthy Atlanta architect, insulated from the world, while Lydia is a single mother scraping by, an ex-addict who has not spoken to Claire in almost two decades. The two women have built entirely separate lives around the same old wound.
Then Claire's husband is murdered in front of her, and the careful surface of her marriage begins to peel away, exposing secrets she can barely comprehend. Forced back into contact, the estranged sisters start pulling at a thread that leads straight back to Julia, and to a darkness far worse than either of them imagined. As the truth surfaces, Claire and Lydia must decide how far they will go for the truth, and for each other.
Karin Slaughter's Pretty Girls is a standalone psychological thriller, ferociously paced and unflinchingly dark, about family, grief, and the violence that can hide behind an ordinary life. Be warned: it earns its reputation as one of her most disturbing novels.