Leave the Girls Behind

August 5, 2024
Childhood trauma haunts a 26-year-old New Yorker in the disquieting latest from Bublitz (after Before You Knew My Name). Manhattan bartender Ruth-Ann Baker is walking to work in 2015 when an AMBER Alert sends her reeling. Nineteen years ago, Ruth’s best friend, seven-year-old Beth Lovely, went missing from a playground in Hoben, Conn.; police eventually found her body in a shallow grave. Now, another seven-year-old has vanished from the same area. In recent years, Ruth became convinced that Ethan Oswald, who was convicted of killing Beth, also murdered three other girls—a theory conceived when the victims’ ghosts started visiting her. She stopped investigating after friends, family, and the cops questioned her sanity, but now she vows to do whatever it takes to end the cycle. Though Oswald died in prison, Ruth suspects that an accomplice may have taken up his mantle, given the similarity of the crimes. Bublitz’s intricate plot relies too heavily on coincidence, but the present-tense narration imparts urgency and unease, while occasional scenes from a captive child’s perspective ratchet up the tension. Despite a few bumps, it’s a solid sophomore effort. Agent: Rebecca Wearmouth, Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

September 24, 2024
Ruth-Ann Baker, affectionately known as ‘Ruthie’ to those around her, never takes the same route home, secures her apartment with three internal chain locks and can recite murder victim statistics off the top of her head. In Jacqueline Bublitz’s Leave the Girls Behind, Ruthie harbours a secret: she’s often visited by the ghost of her childhood best friend, Beth, who was abducted and murdered in their hometown of Hoben, Connecticut, when they were seven years old. When another child goes missing in the town Ruthie left behind, she’s spurred into action, revisiting old memories and piecing together clues to try to establish a pattern. Leave the Girls Behind steps into the framework of a crime mystery novel without being a classic whodunnit. Bublitz (Before You Knew My Name) leans on established tropes of copycat killers, suspected accomplices and online citizen detective forums to explore the hierarchy of victimhood, the ethics of the burgeoning true crime genre, the phenomenon of collective grief, and the legacy of trauma and complicity. There are perpetrators of violence and misogyny, and there are the people who enable them, whether explicitly or implicitly. A page-turner with unexpected twists right up to the end, Leave the Girls Behind will appeal to readers who enjoyed Lucy Treloar’s Days of Innocence and Wonder, Hayley Scrivenor’s Dirt Town and Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.