The Girls Before by Kate Alice Marshall is a dark, slow-burn psychological thriller with feelings of simmering dread. Marshall gives us a character-driven mystery steeped in eerie secrets, guilt, and a sense of privilege. The story starts off quietly, but builds a good deal of tension that will stay with you long after you close the book.
There is a girl in a basement. The door has stopped opening. The light is gone.
Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?
Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.
Kate Alice Marshall continues to craft wonderfully cinematic novels, but The Girls Before takes its time finding its footing. The beginning of the book feels intentionally held back as the tale builds tension through atmosphere rather than action. Once the actual mystery starts to unfold, the pacing tightens a bit and the emotional stakes skyrockets. Marshall’s keen ability to explore things like guilt, identity, and power within this dark academic setting gives the books an edge that I didn’t expect coming into it.
This all being said, the slow start to The Girls Before left me wanting a bit more. While the focus on psychological tension and moral ambiguity pays off in the end, it’s the journey towards that which required a bit of patience. The characters do however feel layered and flawed in way that make their choices more believable and lands with a finale that delivered a satisfying punch.
With The Girls Before, we get a sense of Marshall’s full range of abilities and steps outside her comfort zone a bit. It may not reach the heart-pounding feeling of Marshall’s other novels, personally I loved A Killing Cold as well as No One Can Know, but it’s one that will stick with me for a while.
The Girls Before hits bookstores everywhere on February 24, 2025 from Flatiron Books. The audiobook, narrated by Ina Barrón & Karissa Vacker, is available via Libro.fm!
