The Girls Before

By Kate Alice Marshall

A search & rescue expert. A kidnapped woman. The lost girls who haunt them both.
"A haunting, dual-narrative thriller that traps you in the dark." --The Seattle Times

"A superb mystery. . . Readers will be thinking about this long after they turn the last page." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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.

Kate Alice Marshall, New York Times bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, is back with the thrilling new novel Ashley Winstead calls, "magnetic, shocking, heartbreaking, and unputdownable."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250343089
• ISBN13: 9781250343086
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A great thriller!

I loved listening to this thriller! It had me from the very first chapter with Stranger and the gossamer girls, trapped in the dark and running out of supplies but not ready to give up! I thought it was cool how the chapters switched from below to above and then before and after. It really amped up the tension because it was impossible to know if the case could be solved and the girls could be found in time! Both Stranger and Audrey were compelling characters and I was fully invested in both of their stories, rooting for Stranger to get free and Audrey and her wonderful dog Barry searching for missing people, specifically one girl that disappeared recently. Plus the tales of Jenny Red Hand were nicely creepy and really added to the atmosphere of this book. I think it would be cool to find that tree, but only in the daytime! It has lots of twists, one that I did not expect but was great although dark because of what people might do to keep a crime from being found out and even good people might choose do to do nothing. I had great fun listening to this audiobook! The narrators, Ina Barrón and Karissa Vacker, did a great job in bringing Audrey and Stranger to life and their tales of captivity, searching for the truth and bringing it out for all to see so that the right people get the blame even if it has gotten all twisted over the years. I am glad I got the listen to this and really love the books that Kate Alice Marshall has written.