Lost Girls

An Unsolved American Mystery

By: Robert Kolker

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times best seller

Soon to be a Netflix film.

The best-selling 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 24-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 Shannan’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 20s, 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.

©2013 Robert Kolker (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers

Decent story, but no closure(not authors fault)

Well written, and researched story. primarily of the victims. But seeing as the LISK has not been apprehended, there is no closure. I didn't expect it going in, but i did expect more. Probably worth the credit.

Focus on Victims

True crime book that focuses on the victims. Narrator was great and I finished this in three days. Definitely recommended.

👍

Dobra pozycja fla fanów prawdziwych i nierozwiązanych zagadek kryminalnych.
Napisana i odtworzona z olbrzymim szacunkiem dla ofiar oraz ich rodzin, a nawet podejrzanych o popełnione zbrodnie.
Książka warta uwagi i polecenia.

It was a tough one to follow at first..

Very sad how these women were failed by our justice system and prejudged by society because of their profession. The statistics were shocking to me at the end. I feel for the families and hope someday they that they will have justice.
This book is not at all like the Netflix show. I watched the Netflix one when I couldn’t figure out where it was going, only to realize- it was a very small piece of this book.

heartbreaking and incredible

a great book! so we'll written, an incredibly bias account of all the events that took place.

it's ok

there are alot of characters to keep track on.
story was alot of the girls history and not much on the killer.

a little boring to start,

a tragic about young ladies lost too young. People really need to keep a watchful eye on their children

In-depth review of the victimology of homicide

In the media coverage of murder, the perpetrator gets all the attention, especially when the victims are sex workers. Not in this story. Here, Kolker brings you inside the lives of five women who ended up selling sex for money, and we're all found dead close to one another off an empty road on a New York barrier beach just before Hurricane Sandy. Intensely and thoughtfully narrated by Sean Pratt, this is a book worth all the accolades showered upon it.

It’s about the women

I really appreciated the author’s respect for the women in the story, treating each with the dignity they deserved.

Detailed and engaging.

I knew a little about this case from television, and was very interested to hear more about both the progress of the case and the lives of the victims. It was fairly depressing, but quite interesting, to hear the sad backgrounds of the women and how that played out in the aftermath of the discovery of their remains. The work Kolker did in investigating the residents of the Oak Beach area was quite informative and I was very glad it was included. Nothing like that was included in any television reports I saw of the case. My only real criticism of the book was that it focused very little on the unidentified remains. Whether or not the murders were all related, there must have been more information available (even if just the forensic reports) about these unidentified victims. I realize there could not have been much background information to find without knowing who the bodies belonged to, but it did feel that they were simply not a focus of the book. Yet it seems odd not to have put a little more into that aspect of the story. Still, it was detailed and well-researched. Well worth the credit.