Tandem Readalong: Girl, Forgotten

My latest readalong with Tandem Global was Karin Slaughter’s new suspense novel, Girl Forgotten. It’s the sequel to Pieces of Her, but it can also be read as a standalone. Going in, I hadn’t read the previous novel, but I realized partway through reading that I’d actually seen the Netflix series Pieces of Her. The book and the TV show must be pretty different, because the character of Andrea and her mother Laura were pretty different.

In Girl, Forgotten, our protag Andrea is tougher and sharper than in the TV show. When the novel opens, she’s just completed her training as a US Marshal, and gets her first assignment. In the TV show, Laura was strong and secretive, but here, she’s an annoying, unnecessary helicopter mom. But still, I could kind of see why Andy’s experiences in Pieces of Her led to her wanting to scrap her dispatch job and train as a marshal.

Her first assignment seems like a standard role, protecting a judge who’s received death threats.  But Andrea’s also secretly looking for leads in an unsolved murder from 40 years ago, when pregnant Emily Vaughn was murdered on her prom night, possibly to keep her baby’s father’s identity a secret. And Emily happens to be the daughter of the judge Andrea’s been assigned to protect. With the experienced marshal Leonard Bible as her partner, Andrea also stumbles into a modern cult, run by two of the possible fathers from back in Emily’s time.  One of the other possible fathers and possible murder suspects is Andrea’s own father… There’s a lot of dark secrets beneath the surface of this quiet beachside town, where everybody knows everybody. 

The novels starts out with two timelines, one of them is Emily’s story and one is Andrea’s story. Emily had a close-knit friend group in high school, which reminded me a bit of the intense group in The Secret History or the girls in The Lake of Dead Languages. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, and must have gotten pregnant at their last drug-fueled party, around people she thought she trusted, the group turns against her. There’s a lot of anger and anxiety from everyone around Emily, all about bad girls getting in trouble and ruining a young man’s life.

I expected Emily’s conservative parents and gossipy classmates to be pretty harsh, but I thought Ricky, the other girl in the friend group, would be more of a help to Emily.  I was completely wrong. Ricky is more annoyed that she doesn’t have the college fund she’d expected and she’s going to be stuck working in her family’s diner after graduation, and while I wasn’t exactly sympathetic to her, it was still so sad to see Ricky in Andrea’s timeline, 40 years later, exhausted from working long hours in the diner.

I really enjoyed this book, so many complicated characters! But I have to admit I wasn’t fully into the romantic storyline. Mostly because I felt like Andrea was pushing him away, and while I think a complicated character can be conflicted about what they want, I just hate dudes who are so aggressively interested that they wear the woman down. So every time someone congratulated Andrea on her “engagement,” I liked her boyfriend less and less.

I loved how the different investigations and the events in two timelines connected and unfolded in Girl, Forgotten. So many secrets in this novel! Andrea and Bible’s investigation of the rural cult at first turns up more questions. Why are these emaciated girls all “volunteers” on this hidden farm? Where’s the money coming from? And the narrative asks us again and again, in both storylines, where’s the line between being an awful person and actually being a criminal?

Overall, Girl, Forgotten was another suspenseful thriller, thanks to Tandem.  The ending solved most — but not all — of Andrea’s questions, making a satisfying resolution but leaving strong hints that there’s a third book coming.  It was also really fun to hear what the other readers thought and guessed about this book.  I read a lot of this on my commute, and there’s something extra fun about reading on my own and knowing my bookstagram friends were reading the same thing at the same time.

I received a copy of this book from Tandem to review. All opinions and reactions on my book blog are my own, as always. My previous readalongs with Tandem Global were the thrillers The It Girl and Watch Out For Her.