GILLIAN FLYNN is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl; the New York Times bestseller Dark Places, which was a New Yorker Reviewers' Favorite, Weekend Today Top Summer Read, Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2009, and Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction choice; and the Dagger Award winner Sharp Objects, which was an Edgar(R) nominee for Best First Novel, a BookSense pick, and a Barnes & Noble Discover selection.
Named one of the Best Books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly
A Weekend TODAY "Top Summer Read"
The New Yorker's Reviewers' Favorite from 2009 A 2009 Favorite
Fiction Pick by The Chicago Tribune
"[A] nerve-fraying thriller."
--New York Times Book Review "Flynn's well-paced story deftly shows
the fallibility of memory and the lies a child tells herself to get
through a trauma."
--The New Yorker
"Gillian Flynn coolly demolished the notion that little girls are
made of sugar and spice in Sharp Objects, her sensuous and
chilling first thriller. In DARK PLACES, her equally sensuous and
chilling follow-up, Flynn...has conjured up a whole new crew of
feral and troubled young females....[A] propulsive and twisty
mystery."
--Entertainment Weekly "Flynn follows her deliciously creepy
Sharp Objects with another dark tale . . . The story,
alternating between the 1985 murders and the present, has a tense
momentum that works beautifully. And when the truth emerges, it's
so macabre not even twisted little Libby Day could see it
coming."
--People (4 stars) "Crackles with peevish energy and
corrosive wit."
--Dallas Morning News "A riveting tale of true horror by a
writer who has all the gifts to pull it off."
--Chicago Tribune
"In her first psychological thriller, Sharp Objects, Flynn
created a world unsparingly grim and nasty (the heroine carves
words into her own flesh) written with irresistibly mordant humor.
The sleuth in her equally disturbing and original second novel is
Libby Day....It's Flynn's gift that she can make a caustic,
self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root
for."
--New York Magazine "[A] gripping thriller."
--Cosmopolitan "Gillian Flynn is the real deal, a sharp, acerbic,
and compelling storyteller with a knack for the macabre."
-Stephen King
"Another winner!"
-Harlan Coben "Gillian Flynn's writing is compulsively good. I
would rather read her than just about any other crime writer."
-Kate Atkinson "Dark Places grips you from the first page and
doesn't let go."
-Karin Slaughter
"With her blistering debut Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn hit the
ground running. Dark Places demonstrates that was no fluke."
-Val McDermid "DARK PLACES' Libby Day may seem unpleasant company
at first-she's humoring those with morbid curiosities about her
family's murders in order to get money out of them-but her steely
nature and sharp tongue are compelling. 'I have a meanness inside
me, 'she says, 'real as an organ.'Yes she does, and by the end of
this pitch-black novel, after we've loosened our grip on its cover
and started breathing deeply again, we're glad Flynn decided to
share it."
-Jessa Crispin, NPR.org
"Flynn returns to the front ranks of emerging thriller writers with
her aptly titled new novel . . . Those who prefer their literary
bones with a little bloody meat will be riveted."
--Portland Oregonian "Gillian Flynn may turn out to be a more
gothic John Irving for the 21st century, a writer who uses both a
surgeon's scalpel and a set of rusty harrow discs to rip the pretty
face off middle America."
--San Jose Mercury News
"The world of this novel is all underside, all hard flinch, and
Flynn's razor-sharp prose intensifies this effect as she knuckles
in on every sentence. . . . The slick plotting in DARK PLACES will
gratify the lover of a good thriller-but so, too, will Flynn's
prose, which is ferocious and unrelenting and pure pleasure from
word one."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer "Gillian Flynn's second novel, DARK
PLACES, proves that her first - Sharp Objects - was no
fluke. . . . tough, surprising crime fiction that dips its toes in
the deeper waters of literary fiction."
--Chicago Sun-Times
"Flynn fully inhabits
Libby--a damaged woman whose world has resided entirely in her own
head for the majority of her life and who is prone to dark
metaphors: 'Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with
fangs.' Half the fun of DARK PLACES is Libby's swampy psychology,
which Flynn leads us through without the benefit of hip
waders."
--Time Out Chicago
"Clever, engrossing and
disturbing....[DARK PLACES] should cement [Flynn's] place in the
great authors of crime fiction."
--Crimespree
"[D]eliciously creepy...Flynn follows 250-some pages of masterful
plotting and character development with a speedway pileup of
pulse-pounding revelations."
--Chicago Reader "A
genuinely shocking denouement"
--Romantic Times "Sardonic, riveting . . . Like Kate
Atkinson, Flynn has figured out how to fuse the believable
characters, silken prose and complex moral vision of literary
fiction to the structure of a crime story. . . . You can sense
trouble coming like a storm moving over the prairie, but can't
quite detect its shape."
-Laura Miller, Salon.com "These characters are fully
realized--so true they could step off the page....hints of what
truly happened to the Day family feel painfully, teasingly paced as
they forge an irresistible trail to the truth....Could. Not. Stop.
Reading."
--Bookreporter.com
"Libby's voice is a pitch-perfect blend of surliness and
emotionally charged imagery. . . . The Kansas in these pages is a
bleak, deterministic place where bad blood and lies generate
horrifically unintended consequences. Though there's little
redemption here, Flynn manages to unearth the humanity buried
beneath the squalor."
-Bloomberg.com "Set in the bleak Midwest of America, this
evocation of small-town life and dysfunctional people is every bit
as horribly fascinating as Capote's journalistic retelling of a
real family massacre, In Cold Blood, which it eerily resembles.
This is only Flynn's second crime novel-her debut was the
award-winning Sharp Objects-and demonstrates even more forcibly her
precocious writing ability and talent for the macabre."
- Daily Mail (UK) "Flynn's second novel is a wonderful
evocation of drab small-town life. The time-split narrative works
superbly and the atmosphere is eerily macabre--Dark Places
is even better than the author's award-winning Sharp
Objects."
--The Guardian (UK)
"A gritty, riveting thriller with a one-of-a-kind, tart-tongued
heroine."
--Booklist, starred review "Flynn's second crime thriller
tops her impressive debut, Sharp Objects...When the truth
emerges, it's so twisted that even the most astute readers won't
have predicted it."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The sole survivor of a family massacre is pushed into revisiting a
past she'd much rather leave alone, in Flynn's scorching follow-up
to Sharp Objects . . . Flynn intercuts Libby's venomous
detective work with flashbacks to the fatal day 24 years ago so
expertly that as they both hurtle toward unspeakable revelations,
you won't know which one you're more impatient to finish. . . .
every sentence crackles with enough baleful energy to fuel a whole
town through the coldest Kansas winter."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Once in a while a book comes along that puts a new spin on an old
idea. More than 40 years ago, Truman Capote took readers inside the
Clutter farmhouse in Holcomb, KS, to show them what it was like to
walk in a killer's shoes. Flynn takes modern readers back to Kansas
to explore the fictional 1985 Day family massacre from the
perspective of a survivor as well as the suspects. . . . tight
plotting and engaging characters."
--Library Journal
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