Margins
The Girls Before book cover
The Girls Before
2026
First Published
4.15
Average Rating
320
Number of Pages

From the bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, a new novel about a search & rescue expert, a kidnapped woman, and the lost girls who haunt them both. 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.

Avg Rating
4.15
Number of Ratings
91
5 STARS
43%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
12%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Kate Alice Marshall
Kate Alice Marshall
Author · 16 books

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of young adult and middle grade novels, including I AM STILL ALIVE, RULES FOR VANISHING, and THIRTEENS. She lives outside of Seattle with her husband, two dogs named Vonnegut and Octavia, and two kids. They all conspire to keep her on her toes.

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