Games for Dead Girls

De: Jen Williams

Narrado por: Mhairi Morrison

For Charlie and her niece Katie, it’s supposed to be a quiet holiday in the peaceful, out-of-the-way seaside town of Hithechurch, England. Charlie is researching a book on the folklore of the area, and the gloomy sea and dangerous caves seem to offer up plenty of material, while Katie is just there to run wild and get some fresh air.

But Charlie’s research reveals a deeper, darker secret, one that uncovers her own carefully hidden past. Young women are going missing again: a teenage girl snatched from the beach in broad daylight, and before that, other girls through the decades have vanished from the area, their families left with no answers and no bodies to bury. Charlie’s creation was a thing of felt, straw, fury, and a rusty pair of scissors in the dark. It couldn’t be her monster. Could it? Set on discovering the truth about the girls’ disappearances, she’s about to encounter a force of pure, obsessive malevolence that threatens to destroy anything in its path.

Exploring the fine line where supernatural ends and real human monstrosity begins, Games for Dead Girls is a haunting, dark novel from award-winning author Jen Williams.

©2023 Jen Williams (P)2023 Dreamscape Media

A solid dark story

I enjoyed this quite a bit, it's a very engaging book that mixes elements of horror, mystery, and coming-of-age stories in related plotlines that span multiple time periods. It moved along well and did a good job at retaining my interest while keeping me guessing as to what was going on with the various disappearances and other mysterious happenings that were driving the central story.

My main complaint (as is often the case for the horror/mystery genre) is that the concluding section leading up to the end didn't hit as hard. Plotwise, it made enough sense and tied into the various threads we'd been given up to that point so that it didn't seem out of place. It just felt somewhat anticlimactic compared to when everything was still a mystery. Oh well, it dragged things down a bit, but not too much. In the end, the book still gets a solid recommendation.