Leave the Girls Behind, Jacqueline Bublitz

LEAVE THE GIRLS BEHIND is the latest offering from Jacqueline Bublitz, after the absolutely fascinating BEFORE YOU KNEW MY NAME. This is a different beast entirely, although it's again set in the USA, featuring a strong, unusual central female character.

Ruth-Ann Baker is a college dropout, bartender and amateur detective who lives in an apartment owned by a much loved uncle, with only her beloved dog for company. She's a tormented, complicated character, not at all helped by her obsession with the murder of her best friend, nineteen years earlier, by a suspected serial killer, Ethan Oswald. Oswald's dead now, but when a young girl goes missing from the same home town, there's some evidence to suggest that he might not have been operating alone. 

There wasn't a lot required to get Baker investigating this possibility in her own right. She's regularly visited by the spirit / ghost of her long dead best friend, and there are then three other women involved as Baker becomes more and more invested in discovering the truth.

Whether or not the reader can also become invested in the investigation is even more tricky as the complications pile up and reader's may find themselves with some note taking involved in keeping everything straight and understandable. None of that is helped by a range of coincidences that may induce the same hefty amounts of eye-rolling that this reader struggled to surpress at times.

Bublitz has an interesting way with her central characters. She's happy for them to be imperfect, flawed by past events in their own lives, frequently unreliable, always questionable, just flat out flaky in other words. Baker carries all of those elements with her, and then some. Whilst her story is beautifully evoked, and Bublitz can write lyrically and atmospherically at times, a reader who is happy to go with some of the supernatural elements, in a decidedly non-supernatural setting, and with the conclusions that are leapt to, and the complications and coincidences, will undoubtedly just get this novel. There's also another underlying message here about the outcomes of trauma and how to survive and thrive when trust becomes a lifelong issue, but you might find yourself losing that thread occasionally and maybe that's the point.

This reader struggled with LEAVE THE GIRLS BEHIND. On the one hand, loved the writing style, loved the invocation of character and even some of the sense of place. Wasn't enamoured of the plot, couldn't cope with the coincidences, felt like the threads kept snapping everytime I managed to lay a hand on one. Won't be at all surprised if this isn't a novel that utterly and completely divides opinion and maybe that's the point.