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“Gillian Flynn is the real deal, a sharp, acerbic, and compelling storyteller with a knack for the macabre.”
— Stephen King
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“Dark Places grips you from the first page and doesn't let go.”
— Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Criminal
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“Gillian Flynn’s writing is compulsively good. I would rather read her than just about any other crime writer.”
— Kate Atkinson, New York Times bestselling author of Started Early, Took My Dog
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“Another winner!”
— Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Stay Close
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“[A] nerve-fraying thriller.”
— New York Times
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“Flynn’s well-paced story deftly shows the fallibility of memory and the lies a child tells herself to get through a trauma.”
— New Yorker
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“A riveting tale of true horror by a writer who has all the gifts to pull it off.”
— Chicago Tribune
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“Sardonic, riveting…Flynn has figured out how to fuse the believable characters, silken prose, and complex moral vision of literary fiction to the structure of a crime story.”
— Salon
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“In her first psychological thriller, Sharp Objects, Flynn created a world unsparingly grim and nasty…written with irresistibly mordant humor. The sleuth in her equally disturbing and original second novel is Libby Day…It’s Flynn’s gift that she can make a caustic, self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root for.”
— New Yorker
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“In Dark Places, [Flynn’s] equally sensuous and chilling follow-up, Flynn…has conjured up a whole new crew of feral and troubled young females…[A] propulsive and twisty mystery.”
— Entertainment Weekly
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“Flynn follows her deliciously creepy Sharp Objects with another dark tale…The story, alternating between the 1985 murders and the present, has a tense momentum that works beautifully. And when the truth emerges, it’s so macabre not even twisted little Libby Day could see it coming.”
— People
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“By the end of this pitch-black novel, after we’ve loosened our grip on its cover and started breathing deeply again, we’re glad Flynn decided to share it.”
— NPR
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“Flynn’s second novel is a wonderful evocation of drab small-town life. The time-split narrative works superbly and the atmosphere is eerily macabre—Dark Places is even better than the author’s award-winning Sharp Objects.”
— The Guardian (UK)
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“This is only Flynn’ s second crime novel—her debut was the award-winning Sharp Objects–and demonstrates even more forcibly her precocious writing ability and talent for the macabre.”
— Daily Mail (UK)
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“[A] gripping thriller.”
— Cosmopolitan
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“Crackles with peevish energy and corrosive wit.”
— Dallas Morning News
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“Flynn returns to the front ranks of emerging thriller writers with her aptly titled new novel…Those who prefer their literary bones with a little bloody meat will be riveted.”
— Oregonian
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“The slick plotting in Dark Places will gratify the lover of a good thriller—but so, too, will Flynn’s prose, which is ferocious and unrelenting and pure pleasure from word one.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
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“Gillian Flynn may turn out to be a more gothic John Irving for the twenty-first century, a writer who uses both a surgeons scalpel and a set of rusty harrow discs to rip the pretty face off middle America.”
— San Jose Mercury News
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“Half the fun of Dark Places is Libby’s swampy psychology, which Flynn leads us through without the benefit of hip waders.”
— Time Out Chicago
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“Deliciously creepy…Flynn follows 250-some pages of masterful plotting and character development with a speedway pileup of pulse-pounding revelations.”
— Chicago Reader
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“Clever, engrossing and disturbing…[Dark Places] should cement [Flynn’s] place in the great authors of crime fiction.”
— Crimespree
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“Flynn’s second crime thriller tops her impressive debut, Sharp Objects…When the truth emerges, it’s so twisted that even the most astute readers won’t have predicted it.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Tight plotting and engaging characters.”
— Library Journal
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“A gritty, riveting thriller with a one-of-a-kind, tart-tongued heroine.”
— Booklist
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“Every sentence crackles with enough baleful energy to fuel a whole town through the coldest Kansas winter.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“A genuinely shocking denouement.”
— RT Book Reviews
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“These characters are fully realized—so true they could step off the page…Could. Not. Stop. Reading.”
— Bookreporter.com
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“Libby’s voice is a pitch-perfect blend of surliness and emotionally charged imagery…The Kansas in these pages is a bleak, deterministic place where bad blood and lies generate horrifically unintended consequences. Though there’s little redemption here, Flynn manages to unearth the humanity buried beneath the squalor.”
— Bloomberg.com
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“With her blistering debut Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn hit the ground running. Dark Places demonstrates that was no fluke.”
— Val McDermid, author of The Vanishing Point