The Church of Dead Girls A Thriller [Paperback]

One by one, three young girls vanish in a small town in upstate New York. With the first disappearance, the townspeople begin to mistrust outsiders. When the second girl goes missing, neighbors and childhood friends start to eye each other warily. And with the third disappearance, the sleepy little town awakens to a full-blown nightmare.The Church of Dead Girlsis a novel that displays  Stephen Dobyns’ remarkable gifts for exploring human nature, probing the ruinous effects of suspicion. As panic mounts and citizens take the law into their own hands, no one is immune, and old rumors, old angers, and old hungers come to the surface to reveal the secret history of a seemingly genteel town and the dark impulses of its inhabitants.“Long after most other tales of murder and insanity have panted to their foregone conclusions, the suspense in this tale continues to build.The Church of Dead Girlsis a meditation on hysteria, immensely ambitious, but Dobyns tells the tale with thte calm—and the fearful inevitability—of a man walking down a long hotel corridor to a room where some awful thing is waiting. Best of all? He never pulls up or turns aside—I kept reading, riveted by the plot and rooting with all my heart for Dobyns to pull it off. And he did, in a terrifying climax. I don’t expect to read a more frightening novel this year. Very rich, very scary, very satisfying.” –Stephen King
 
“A complex parable of social disintegration…Dobyns’sad a disquieting novel carries a contemporary moral, true in even the smallest American towns.”–The New York Times Book Review
 
“A chilling evocation of small-town life turned upside down. Dobyns delivers the goods.” –San Francisco Chronicle

The Church of Dead Girlsis that rare thing--a genuine thriller that transcends its genre. You'll read it with equal parts cl3.