I felt that this was a great concept but not really a great story. It could have been a short story and I would have been pleased. Our heroine is a journalist in Chicago, fresh out of a stay in a psyche ward to deal with her specific self-harm issues.
She has a bad relationship with her mother, especially after the death of her little sister, about 20 years prior to the current story. She is assigned a story in Wind Gap, a very small town in which she grew up. Her manager believes there may be a serial killer loose in the small town. One child has been killed another missing. The interesting part of this is that not only are the kids killed, all of their teeth have been pulled.
The heroine takes the job but isn't happy. She heads to the small town and shows up at her mothers' door. Her mother and stepfather are cordial but obviously not pleased with her presence. She stays in her room and tries to obtain information from the people in the town about the murders. In the meanwhile her mother is telling her that she's an awful person for researching the murder.
I think this work is ok. I'm currently reading Dark Places and I can see the progression of Flynn's work. Some plot points were incredibly interesting. However, having read her other work, Gone Girl, I was expecting more, which definitely drew down the ranking for her, which really isn't fair. You know what? It's a good book. If I read this from another author, I would tout it as a good book but maybe because Gone Girl destroyed me, Sharp Objects pales in comparison.
