The Girls Before by Kate Alice Marshall on February 24, 2026
Genres: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths, Fiction / Thrillers / Crime, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
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There is a girl in a basement.
The door has stopped opening.
The light is gone.
Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?
Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.
It’s chilling, gripping, and utterly impossible to put down. I couldn’t rest until I finished, I had to know what was going to happen next! 😂
This psychological suspense is dark, layered, and filled with an eerie, atmospheric tension that lingers long after you turn the final page. The setting adds so much to the unsettling tone, creating a constant sense of unease that keeps you on edge throughout. Kate Alice Marshall proves once again that she is incredibly talented. After reading several of her books, she has officially become one of my auto buy authors. She has such a gift for crafting twisty plots and deeply compelling characters that pull you in and refuse to let go. If you love dark, psychological thrillers that keep you guessing, I definitely recommend this one!
I rated this novel 4.5 stars. As with any mystery thriller, there will be parts where you have to suspend your disbelief, but I did not find that difficult to do with this story. I have read this author before and her writing always grabs me and I have loved everything I’ve read by her. Her writing just really works for me.