Lost Girls, Robert Kolker
Lost Girls, Robert Kolker
30 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Lost Girls
An Unsolved American Mystery

Bestseller

Author: Robert Kolker

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 11 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 07/09/2013


Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller • Now a Netflix FilmThe 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.

About Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting. His journalism has appeared in New York magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, O the Oprah Magazine, and The Marshall Project. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Debbie on August 01, 2013

Perusing some of these reviews, I have no idea why no one else seems to be puzzled by how very little information about the police investigation is given. Yes, Kolker does a good job of creating portraits of the "Lost Girls" and their families, and the book's arguably best attribute is its portrayal......more

Goodreads review by Karin on March 05, 2014

As a kid, I started reading true crime with Helter Skelter, then went on to the master (Ann Rule) and never looked back. Sometime in the last decade, true crime took a wrong turn (in my opinion, of course). The writing stopped focusing on the victim and started glorifying the killer. Serial killers......more

Goodreads review by emma on August 12, 2023

the good news is this was part of my favorite niche subgenre: True Crime That Has Since Been Solved. the bad news is that, though this was very thoughtfully researched, it was also very weird. i enjoyed the first half that carefully constructed the girls' stories, but the author's attempts to switch......more

Goodreads review by Bren fall in love with the sea. on August 01, 2019

I do include True Crime in my list of genres I read. Some are better then others. This book is among the b est I have read so if you are a fan of this genre and have not read this, put i t on your list! In some ways, it is not even a book I would classify under that genre. This book is not about the......more