Like Tom Perotta and Jodi Picoult, Kimberly McCreight beautifully captures the darkness and drama beneath the surface of seemingly placid, idyllic lives. This second novel ruthlessly unpicks the fabric of picture-perfect, upper-middle-class suburban society, and what it reveals will shock you to the core.
At the end of a long winter in bucolic Ridgedale, New Jersey, the body of an infant is discovered in the woods near the town's prestigious university campus. No one knows who the baby is, or how her body ended up out there. But there is no shortage of opinions.
When freelance journalist Molly Anderson is unexpectedly called upon to cover the story for the Ridegdale Reader it's a risk, given the severe depression that followed the loss of her own baby. But the bigger threat comes when Molly unearths some of Ridgedale's darkest secrets. Meanwhile, Sandy, a high school dropout, searches for her volatile and now missing mother, and PTA president Barbara struggles to help her young son who's suddenly having disturbing outbursts.
Told from the perspectives of Molly, Barbara, and Sandy, Kimberly McCreight's taut and profoundly moving novel unwinds the tangled truth about the baby's death revealing that these three women have far more in common than they realized. And that their lives are more intertwined with what happened to the baby than they ever could have imagined.