The Girls Before

Description

A search & rescue expert. A kidnapped woman. The lost girls who haunt them both.
“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, 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.”

Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Kate Alice Marshall
Published: 02/24/2026
Publisher: Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar
ISBN: 9781250343086
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.11lbs
Size: 1.11″ H x 9.51″ L x 6.60″ W

About the Author
Kate Alice Marshall is the author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, A Killing Cold, and multiple novels for younger readers. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.