New York Times Bestseller • Now a Netflix Film
The bestselling account of the lives of five young women whose fates converged in the perplexing case of the Long Island Serial Killer.
“Rich, tragic...monumental...true-crime reporting at its best.”—Washington Post
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life—went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan’s.
There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannon’s disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their twenties, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage.
Long considered “one of the best true-crime books of all time” (Time), Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.
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“Kolker’s empathetic and detailed
portrayals of the victims, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with their
families and friends, [makes for] an impressive and impassioned work of
investigative journalism and a chilling commentary on the entangled influences
of economics, race, technology and politics on sex and murder in the Internet
age. Kolker, a reporter for New York magazine, is that rare-breed journalist
who latched onto a difficult story and refused to let go. In this haunting
tale, he bravely and meticulously recreates the lives of once hopeful but sadly
forgotten young women, while shining a light on the economic hardships that
pushed them to make tough, risky choices.”
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Amazon.com, editorial review