The day after Natalie’s funeral, Camille goes downstairs to find her half-sister sitting on the porch playing with a four-foot dollhouse, an exact replica of Adora’s sprawling Victorian manse. When Camille arrives downtown, she stumbles upon a horrific scene: Natalie Keene’s body has been propped up on the street, and all of her teeth are missing from her mouth. Camille sleeps fitfully and wakes up before dawn to head down to the police station. Camille asks Adora where her thirteen-year-old daughter Amma is, and Adora says that she’s upstairs sleeping. Camille’s family is Wind Gap royalty-her mother, Adora Crellin, is the heiress to a hog farm which produces two percent of the country’s pork. Camille pays a visit to her mother’s house and asks to stay there for the duration of her assignment. After prodding the man, Camille learns that last year, nine-year-old Ann Nash was found strangled to death in a creek in the woods, with all of the teeth pulled from her mouth-now, ten-year-old Natalie Keene is missing, too. When Camille arrives, she pays a visit to the closed-off sheriff Chief Vickery, who is reluctant to talk about either case. When Camille’s boss, Frank Curry, sends her to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, to investigate the second missing girl there in less than a year, she is reluctant to return-the withdrawn, heavy-drinking Camille holds within her a wealth of trauma and pain related to the death of her younger sister Marian years ago. Camille Preaker works as a reporter at the Daily Post, an unremarkable newspaper in Chicago.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn