Fiction. A driver lures a young girl into his car. A woman recalls a not-so- innocent childhood game. A man reveals much more than he'll ever tell the police. After a high school girl is murdered, everyone has an opinion. A girl wakes beside a dumpster to find slut scrawled on her body--and that's not the worst thing that happened last night. A girl speaks up after a crime--but is she telling the truth? And could you blame her if she's not? The girls who populate Jacqueline Doyle's THE MISSING GIRL have vanished. Or their childhoods have gone missing. In Doyle's collection of flash fictions, the voicelessness of the missing is palpable, the girls' stories whispered into a vacuum or recounted from the point of view of a predator, murderer, or voyeur. Violence lurks below the surface here, haunts the back pages of newspapers, takes up residence in your dreams. You know a missing girl. "Full of sex, lies, and vivid insights into the human compulsion to do the wrong thing, these stories go down easy but hit hard. A powerful and provocative collection."--Frances Lefkowitz "In these dark and edgy stories, Jacqueline Doyle has made a dispassionate study of the degradation of girls and the twisted hearts of those who harm them. Most chilling is the ease with which these characters fall prey to violence and how quickly depravity finds its way past the surface of ordinary situations. Prepare to be very disturbed."--Elizabeth McKenzie "Jacqueline Doyle knows where you live. The stories in her collection, THE MISSING GIRL, have your address and even after the first read (and you will be back, she knows that), these stories will be moving in to stay. Whatever your usual role in a culture with an undeniable instinct for violence, Doyle's writing lures you to do more than dismiss it, more than abhor it, and yet this isn't a welcome to merely spectate, there is nothing gratuitous here unless life itself is gratuitous. In fact, Doyle has found the thread through that menace that surrounds us and is in us and is calling you in to hold onto your bit of it, to witness. Here, Doyle choreographs the everyday dance between safety and terror, between taking the chances we need to live and not living at all. THE MISSING GIRL is a masterful work and a must read."--Tupelo Hassman "Dark, haunting, relevant, cohesive, and incredibly well conceived. I absolutely loved THE MISSING GIRL."--Simone Muench
