Contemporary Authors

• The Monster's Wife ( novel) Barbican Press 2016

1. The American girl LCCN 2016286886 Type of material Book Personal name Horsley, Kate, author. Main title The American girl / Kate Horsley. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of HarpeCollinsPublishers, [2016] ©2016 Description 423 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9780062438515 (pbk.) 0062438514 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PR6108.O774 A84 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• The Monster's Wife - October 1, 2016 Barbican Press, https://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Wife-Kate-Horsley/dp/1909954055/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

• Kate Horsley - http://www.katehorsley.co.uk/

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  about
  Kate Horsley

  Born into a family of eccentrics and raised in a haunted house on the outskirts of London, I developed an early interest in the dark side of things. At the age of 21, I moved to Boston MA to take up a scholarship at Harvard and lived and worked there for nearly a decade, my jobs ranging from Lecturer and researcher to babysitter and box-assembler. Eventually my childhood dreams of being a writer began to haunt me and I abandoned truth for fiction.

  I now live in Manchester with my artist husband, John Brewer, a small person called Violet and a ghost called Ron. My first novel, The Monster’s Wife, came out with Barbican Press in September 2014 and was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. My second novel, The American Girl, will be published by with William Morrow (US) and Killer Reads (UK) in summer 2016. My poems and short fiction have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies including Best British Crime Stories. I’m represented by Oli Munson at A.M. Heath.

  Photo © John Brewer

  books

  THE AMERICAN GIRL

  THE MONSTER’S WIFE

  CAKE MAGAZINE
  Even Birds Are Chained to the Sky
  EVEN BIRDS ARE CHAINED TO THE SKY

  BLISS ANTHOLOGY

  BEST BRITISH CRIME

  RAVENGLASS ANTHOLOGY

  THE AMERICAN GIRL

  THE MONSTER’S WIFE

  CAKE MAGAZINE
  Even Birds Are Chained to the Sky
  EVEN BIRDS ARE CHAINED TO THE SKY

  BLISS ANTHOLOGY

  BEST BRITISH CRIME

  RAVENGLASS ANTHOLOGY

  THE AMERICAN GIRL

  THE MONSTER’S WIFE

  CAKE MAGAZINE
  Even Birds Are Chained to the Sky
  EVEN BIRDS ARE CHAINED TO THE SKY

  BLISS ANTHOLOGY

  BEST BRITISH CRIME

  RAVENGLASS ANTHOLOGY

  THE AMERICAN GIRL

  THE MONSTER’S WIFE

  CAKE MAGAZINE
  Even Birds Are Chained to the Sky
  EVEN BIRDS ARE CHAINED TO THE SKY

  BLISS ANTHOLOGY

  BEST BRITISH CRIME

  RAVENGLASS ANTHOLOGY

  THE AMERICAN GIRL

  THE MONSTER’S WIFE

  CAKE MAGAZINE
  Even Birds Are Chained to the Sky
  EVEN BIRDS ARE CHAINED TO THE SKY

  BLISS ANTHOLOGY

  BEST BRITISH CRIME

  RAVENGLASS ANTHOLOGY
  Copyright © Kate Horsley 2016. All rights reserved.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Horsley_(UK_author)

  Kate Horsley (UK author)
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Kate Horsley is the author of two novels, The American Girl[1] and The Monster’s Wife.[2] Most of her short and long fiction, including The American Girl, has been within the crime fiction genre, although her début novel, The Monster’s Wife, is historical gothic fiction.[3] Horsley is a co-editor (with her mother, Lee Horsley) of crime fiction review site crimeculture.com.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  3 Awards
  4 Bibliography
  5 References
  6 External links
  Early life[edit]
  The child of academics, Horsley had an unconventional upbringing and was educated at home for parts of her childhood.[3] She studied English Literature at Oxford University and at the age of 21, she moved to Boston to take up a scholarship at Harvard where she studied Medieval Literature. She lectured at Harvard for a year before returning to the UK.[4]

  Career[edit]
  Horsley's poems and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines and anthologies[5] including The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime.[4]

  Her first novel, The Monster's Wife, was published by Barbican Press in September 2014.[6] A sequel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel is set on an island in the Scottish Orkneys and narrated from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a bride for his monster.[7]

  Her second novel, The American Girl, was published by William Morrow in August 2016.[1][8][9][10]

  Awards[edit]
  In 2014, Horsley was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year (Saltire) Award for The Monster’s Wife.[2] She has previously won awards for her work from Sentinel Literary Quarterly and Adoption Matters Northwest[11] and been shortlisted for an Asham award for short fiction and a Ravenglass Poetry Press Prize.[4]

  Bibliography[edit]
  Novels

  The American Girl. (William Morrow, 2016, ISBN 978-0062438515)
  The Monster's Wife. (Barbican Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1909954052)
  Short Stories

  'Kissing Hitler'. Even Birds Are Chained To The Sky and Other Tales (The Fine Line, 2011, ISBN 978-0956761057)
  'Jungle Boogie'. The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 (Robinson Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-1780330945)
  'Tin Valentine'. Dark Valentine Magazine, June 2011
  'Star’s Jar'. The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 (Robinson Publishing, 2010, ISBN 978-1849011976 )
  'Musooli'. Momaya Annual Review (Momaya Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0615172767)
  Poetry

  'Paper Bullets' and other poems, Bliss Anthology (Templar, 2011, ISBN 978-1906285173)
  ‘Port-au-Prince’ and other poems, The Ravenglass Poetry Press Anthology, (The Ravenglass Poetry Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0956539540)
  'Rules for Looking After Ian', winning competition entry, Lancashire Adoption Matters, 2011
  ‘A Patch of Grass’ and other poems, Erbacce Magazine, 2011
  ‘Eleonora of Toledo laughs at a pantomime dildo’, Sentinel Literary Quarterly (winner), Sentinel Champions 5, 2011
  Articles

  'Interrogations of Society in Contemporary African Crime Writing'. (Crime Across Cultures, Issue 13.1 of Moving Worlds, Spring 2013)
  'Storyboarding and Storytelling: Literacy and the Short Story'. (Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Issue 2, Spring 2012)
  'Radiophonics'. With Graham Mort. (Writing in Education, Spring 2008)
  'Learning Italian: Serial Killers Abroad in the Novels of Highsmith and Harris'. With Lee Horsley. (University of Delaware Press, Monash Romance Studies Series, 2008)
  'Body Language: Reading the Corpse in Forensic Crime Fiction'. With Lee Horsley. (Paradoxa, Summer 2006)
  'Mères Fatales: Maternal Guilt in the Noir Crime Novel'. With Lee Horsley. (Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 45.2, Summer 1999)
  References[edit]
  ^ Jump up to: a b "'This Summer, Girls in Titles and Girls in Peril', The New York Times, 26 May 2016".
  ^ Jump up to: a b "Alistair Munro, 'Kate Horsley 'Found Frankenstein's Bride in Orkney', The Scotsman, 19 October 2014".
  ^ Jump up to: a b "Lucy Walton-Lange, 'Exclusive interview with Kate Horsley', Female First, 16 September 2014".
  ^ Jump up to: a b c "University of Chester, Department of English, Profile for Kate Horsley".
  Jump up ^ "'University of Chester lecturer nominated for book award', Chester Chronicle, October 2014".
  Jump up ^ "'Scottish book award honour for local gothic novelist Kate', Lancaster Evening Post, 03 November 2014".
  Jump up ^ "The Saltire Society".
  Jump up ^ "'London Book Fair Briefcase 2015', BookBrunch, 07 April 2015".
  Jump up ^ "'Book review (Fiction): 'The American Girl', Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 August 2016".
  Jump up ^ "'Hot Reads for Late Summer ', Parade, 9 August 2016".
  Jump up ^ "'Charity win for local poet', Lancaster Evening Post, 18 January 2011".
  External links[edit]
  Kate Horsley's website
  Crimeculture
  Categories: Historical fiction writersLiving peopleHarvard University alumni
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  Q&A WITH KATE HORSLEY
  The Monster's Wife

  The author of The Monster’s Wife tells us a bit about her unusual background and how she wrote her debut novel.
  Q. Set the scene of The Monster’s Wife for us.

  KH: The novel takes place in late 18th century Orkney, on the tiny island of Hoy, where the local people live off the land as their forebears have done for hundreds of years. The main character, Oona, is a sixteen-year-old girl who knows no other way of life. She feels increasingly distant from the other islanders, though, because of her heart defect, an illness which took her mother from her when she was still a small girl and which she knows will kill her sooner or later.

  When a mysterious doctor arrives on the island, he makes a good subject for gossip, but his tenancy in the manor house along with some strange natural occurences are taken as ill omens.

  May, Oona’s best friend, goes to work as a housemaid for the doctor in order to save money for her wedding. She makes Oona party to a dark secret involving her new employer and Oona finds herself working at the big house too, becoming the doctor’s confidante and aiding him in his experiments.

  Tensions deepen between the doctor and the tight-knit religious community on Hoy, and not without reason: Doctor Frankenstein’s investigations into the line that divides life and death disturb Oona more the more she knows about them.

  Then May disappears and Oona’s world changes forever.

  Q. Are there any particular events that inspired you to write it?

  KH: About three years ago, I went to see Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Frankenstein, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternating in the roles of doctor and creature. It was a mesmerizing production and the first time I’d seen the monster portrayed as vulnerable and damaged rather than ploddingly violent, as he is in some of the (albeit wonderful) early twentieth-century creature-feature interpretations.

  There’s a part of the play where Victor Frankenstein (very much the antagonist in Boyle’s interpretation) stands in a dark room with a naked woman he has just created and is about to destroy. That particular scene haunted me: the idea of such an intense act of scientific creation so swiftly followed by brutal destruction was to me the most horrifying moment in the production. I thought about that woman’s brief life and wanted to know more about her.

  Q. So your reaction to Frankenstein as a reader/viewer turned into a literary response to Shelley’s work?

  KH: Yes, after seeing the play, I went back to the book and was reminded that the bride is created on one of the Orkney islands. In chapter 19, Victor chooses the most desolate place imaginable to create a second creature, a bride for the monster. “I traversed the northern Highlands,” he says, “and fixed on one of the remotest, the Orkneys, as the scene.” In this secluded location, he creates the ‘bride’ to satisfy the demands of the creature for a mate and to prevent his own family from being murdered. But, disgusted by what he’s attempted, he destroys her before she is fully alive.

  I was as curious as I was horrified: Had the monster’s wife once been a girl living on a remote island, or more than one girl? Who was this bride? How did she die? What did she feel? I had an image of a young Orcadian girl living a quiet life, a naive girl whose world would change forever when the doctor’s boat landed with the creature on his heels.

  Q. Did you spend time on the Orkney islands to gather in the detail for this book?

  Hoy, Orkney
  Hoy, Orkney

  KH: I made an amazing trip to Orkney, not least because Highland Park is the finest single malt I’ve ever known. The Orkney islands are full of cairns and stone circles, sites of pagan worship thousands of years old. I saw fascinating places on the Mainland, like an 18th century farmhouse recreated exactly as it would have been, with a central hearth and spaces for chickens to perch in the rafters and straw for pigs to sleep on alongside their human owners. But I’d already settled on Hoy as the island Doctor Frankenstein lands on.

  Hoy is a haunted place in its own right, a tiny island dominated by a dead volcano. To this day it has a very small population, barely more than the thirty I mention in the book. During World War II, it served as a naval base for the British and was home to 20,000 servicemen. When the war ended they abandoned the island, leaving bunkers and trucks, submarine parts and boats and fuelling stations to rust in the thick heather and ferns that cover the island.

  I wrote most of the novel in a cottage let to us by devout Christians who had come to Hoy for spiritual reasons. As I walked through the volcanic valley and over the beaches with their red rock cliffs rising sheer and high, hearing loons calling from everywhere, the character of Oona became increasingly real for me. Not only the girl she is to begin with, who roams the island longing for adventure, but the tortured woman she eventually turns into.

  Q. Frankenstein was written by a woman in a pre-feminist era. Your story is filtered through a maidservant. Do you see it as a feminist take on the earlier work?

  FrankensteinKH: I think of Mary Shelley as an ardent proto-feminist. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and really launched the discussion that developed into modern feminism.

  But for all that, Frankenstein is quite a masculine book. Women linger in the background. They are wives, servants, victims. I wanted to bring those female figures to the fore and let them drive the narrative. The working classes stay in the background of the novel too. So, retelling the story from the perspective of a female maid was a satisfying way of interacting with Shelley’s book, though I never set out to make an ideological statement. I’m a woman and a feminist, though, with generations of working class ancestors and it was probably inevitable that the book raises those sorts of questions.

  When I wrote about Oona slaving away in the big house, I often had in mind my grandma Hilda who partly brought me up. She was adopted by childless parents who wanted a maid as much as a child and she was put to work as a barmaid aged fourteen. She worked behind a bar for the next sixty years and in my mind’s eye I often see her scrubbing the steps and polishing glasses when really she had the potential to do so much more. The character of Oona owes a large debt to my hard-working and endlessly friendly grandma.

  Kate
  Showing an early interest in natural philosophy.

  Q. You’ve mentioned in your biography that you come from ‘a family of eccentrics’. Can you tell us a little more about your background?

  KH: I grew up in an Edwardian house on the outskirts of London with my family and a shifting succession of unusual people, including my uncle Alan, who had been a Communist spy, an odd-job man known alternately as David and Penny depending on what he was wearing and Andrzej, my father’s PhD student. The house was haunted, so my grandmother said, by the ghost of the previous occupant, Mrs Vale. Her spectral piano playing could sometimes be heard under the right weather conditions, and she was known to appear on the stairs dressed all in black, with a bemused expression on her face.

  My father was a mad scientist. When I was eight years old, he took my brothers and me out of school for ideological reasons, and we were educated at home. He taught us maths and science, and was given to staging experiments in a whimsical and dramatic fashion. When I learned to tell time, it was not from a watch but from first principles, and I remember vividly creating a candle clock of sorts and watching it burn down far into the night, in an attempt to deduce how time might have been told before clocks existed. To this day I don’t quite know how you would tell time from a watch.

  We were all quite eccentric, I suppose, most of all my father. He called a psychic hotline before making any important financial decisions and spent much time communing with foxes and engaged in impassioned battles against encroaching magpies and the local council. Once, we returned from a trip to Cornwall to find that he’d buried all of our shoes in the garden. When I was eight years old, he was lecturing at the LSE and acquired a graduate student, Andrzej. Homesick and far from his native Poland, he was finding life in the student dormitory hard so my father invited him to stay for Christmas. None of us then knew that he would remain in our house for the next twenty-five years. Perhaps that last detail is the reason that mysterious guests are a bit of an obsession of mine, especially scientific ones like Victor Frankenstein. For the same reason, I would hesitate to ever invite anyone to stay for Christmas.

  The Horsley children
  The products of an eccentric upbringing.

  Q. Has this unconventional upbringing influenced your writing as a whole, or the writing of The Monster’s Wife in particular?

  KH: Absolutely! My father’s experiments gave me a lifelong fascination with science – in books, in films, in real life – and with mad scientists. Hence my rewriting of Frankenstein. Meanwhile my mother, a crime fiction expert, taught us literature and history, and, best of all, how to tell stories. It’s my mother who passed on to me an obsession with the supernatural and all things mysterious. I think that is very much reflected in my current interests in horror films and crime fiction and in the dark undercurrents in my own writing.

  And not only writing: everything around me always seems full of potential stories, tall tales and monsters. Growing up, I felt that our house had its own mythology. There was a shoe-eating beast living under the stairs, a Hopi Indian god that guarded the door of our bedroom, and a Norwegian imp match-holder on the kitchen wall that gave you the evil eye if you didn’t walk past quickly enough.

  Although I don’t think I’m especially superstitious, I grew up with a vivid sense of invisible friends all around us, some from existing mythologies, some invented on the spur of the moment. It’s meant that I’ve always felt compelled to embroider reality to make it a little more entertaining. Although of course what I have just told you is all completely true.

  Q. There seem to be quite a few rewritings of classics at the moment. Why do you think that is?

  KH: I think we retell our favourite tales because we love them, and the characters from them become almost like real people to us, and we want to share them with our children or our students or anyone who will listen, perhaps making a change here and there to keep the story relevant for each generation. I never intended The Monster’s Wife to be part of a trend, but around the time that I finished the first draft of it I started to realise that there were quite a few literary rewritings being published, ranging from Megan Shepherd’s The Madman’s Daughter, which reworks The Island of Dr Moreau, to the ‘Jane Austen and zombies’ series. In the past I have read literary responses such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, and a couple of months ago I read Jo Baker’s wonderful Longbourn, which is Pride and Prejudice retold from the servants’ perspective.

  It’s strange to find yourself part of the zeitgeist, particularly as I always feel myself to be a little out of touch with fashions of any kind, but I think this current vogue for rewriting the Victorians is really just a recent example of a general human tendency to re-imagine favourite stories. After all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is itself is a retelling of a classical myth, and that fact is spelled out in the subtitle – the Modern Prometheus. Her rewriting reflects the issues of science, ethics and gender that obsessed her and were so of her time. In The Monster’s Wife, although I set the narrative in the late 18th century, a lot of the themes that emerge through it are very much of our time too – issues that are near to my heart: equality between the sexes; the double-edged sword of religion that both creates communities and divides them; the wonders and dangers of scientific experimentation, which always seems to me poised on an ethical knife-edge. I think Mary Shelley’s work still holds our fascination because everything she writes about from her time is even more central to ours.

  Q. Frankenstein now has this as a sequel. Do you sense a sequel for The Monster’s Wife?

  KH: I was sad to part from Oona. She had been my constant companion for the better part of two years and she felt like a friend to me. I was genuinely bereft when I finished the last draft and (as Martin will attest!) it was really hard to let the book go. But no, I never had a sequel in mind.

  In fact, the novel I’m working on now actually couldn’t be more different, since it’s a psychological thriller set in the present day. Having said that, there are similarities. The narrator of The American Girl is sixteen, like Oona; and like Oona, she’s a lone figure thrust into conflict with a small community where she’s suspected of wrongdoing. On top of that, the novel is set on the coast and much of it takes place in sight of the sea. Perhaps my seafaring Norwegian origins have made me fear small communities and long for that kind of landscape. Or maybe I just need a holiday.

  The Monster’s Wife is out now in paperback and ebook.

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• Book Club Girl - https://www.bookclubgirl.com/book_club_girl/2016/08/kate-horsley-author-of-the-american-girl-talks-with-robin-wasserman-author-of-girls-on-fire.html

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  the american girl
  August 31, 2016

  Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl talks with Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire

  The American Girl by Kate Horsley is a riveting psychological thriller about an American exchange student in France involved in a suspicious accident—and the dark secrets a small town is hiding. . . .

  On a quiet summer morning seventeen-year-old American exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near the small French town of St. Roch, barefoot, bloodied, and unable to say what has happened to her.

  Quinn’s appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family, the Blavettes, has mysteriously disappeared. Now the media, and everyone in the idyllic village, are wondering if the American girl has anything to do with the missing family.

  Today we’re excited to share a Q&A between Kate Horsley and Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire. They discuss Kate’s inspiration behind the book, character development, and much more!

  Purchase The American Girl from your favorite retailer now.

  Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl talks with Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire

  RW: I know you studied abroad in France when you were younger, and I’m curious whether you’ve been playing around with this idea ever since. If not, what sparked the impulse to return to those experiences and that setting all these years later?

  KH: In my teens, I stayed with a family in a little town just like St Roch. The combination of fevered adolescence and vivid landscape made my visits pretty intense. When I was staying in the South of France more recently, the whole thing came flooding back to me. I looked back at my (very dramatic!) teen diaries of France and Quinn’s story started there.

  RW: This is such an impeccably crafted thriller—every time I thought I knew where it was going, it swerved. How did you manage to design such a finely tuned mystery? Are you a big reader of this kind of story? Are there books or movies that you used as models or inspiration?

  KH: Thank you so much! I’m a huge crime and suspense fiction fan. My mom and I run a fiction and film review site called crimeculture.com, which gives me a great excuse to read all the latest psychological suspense and crime novels and watch series like How To Get Away With Murder, True Detective and Orange Is The New Black for… research purposes.

  RW: In a strange coincidence, I was in France myself when I read your book, and was really impressed by how well you captured the texture of life there. Could you talk about the process of writing about a landscape and culture that isn’t your own? What kinds of research did you do, and how much were you able to draw on your own memories?

  KH: That’s amazing! France is one of my favorite countries to visit. More generally, I love both travel and travel writing: when everything is new and different, my writer-brain lights up like the Fourth of July. My primary research for The American Girl involved visiting places similar to those featured, asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I wrote some of the novel in the bar that La Gorda is based on and it’s just like the club is in the book, only more so.

  RW: The book is told via alternating points of view, but while Molly’s half of the story is straightforward, Quinn’s life is revealed to us in a fascinating and nonlinear pastiche of video transcripts and blog entries. Was that the plan for Quinn’s chapters from the beginning? What appealed to you about that approach?

  KH: Quinn’s amnesia makes her seem a victim at first, but as the novel continues, doubts about her story grow. Molly is the story’s detective figure, trying to piece together the mystery that is Quinn; to find out whether she’s telling the truth or creating a clever cover story. Fragmented accounts like blogs and video diaries seemed the right way to me convey Quinn’s confusion… or perhaps her duplicity.

  RW: You could read this novel as a fierce indictment of the media and the way our culture treats young women…or, at least, I did! Am I on the right track here about the kinds of pointed questions The American Girl is trying to ask?

  KH: Absolutely. I wanted to explore the way that the paparazzi and social media feed off young women in the spotlight and create powerful distortion fields around cases like these. The media provide the narrative drive of the novel, steering the story around various hairpin bends and pushing Quinn and Molly into some very dark places.

  Posted at 17:50 PM: Book Blogs, Book Groups, Books, Reading Groups
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  Q&A with Kate Horsley, author of THE AMERICAN GIRL

  Posted on September 13, 2016 by The Editor
  Category: Interview
  161552-fc50

  What drew you to the world of crime fiction?

  I’ve been obsessed with things that go bump in the night since I can remember. I grew up a house that was rumoured to be haunted by a woman who’d lived there. The bedroom she died in was known as the “red room”: the wallpaper was red and I used to imagine I could see her face in the pattern and wonder how she died. There were also two spectral children who my brothers and I pretended to have tea parties with. The house was also full of crime novels because my mum was writing about them… So, there was no escaping a life of crime in the end.

  What author (besides yourself) do you think that everyone should read?

  H.G. Wells. However often I go back to his books, I’m amazed at how gripping they are. He’s a master not just of the page-turner, but of making every sentence count towards the suspense.

  Tell us about your new book:

  The American Girl tells the story of an exchange student called Quinn Perkins who stumbles out of the woods near a French town. Barefoot and bloodied, her appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family has mysteriously disappeared. Journalist Molly Swift is drawn to the story and will do anything to discover whether Quinn is really an innocent abroad, or a diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder. Molly herself, however, is not entirely to be trusted.

  Did a lot of research go into it?

  I was in France when I came up with the idea for The American Girl and so my research involved visiting places similar to those featured in the book, asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I wrote some of the novel in the bar that La Gorda is based on and it’s just like the club is in the book. Anything I couldn’t find while I was in France, I looked up in a book or on the internet.

  Do you think you could pull off the ‘perfect murder’?

  I love lists and planning, which would help with the “perfect” part and I can be a bit of a neat freak, so that would help with hiding the evidence after the fact. Unfortunately, though, the whole thing might come adrift because I’m such a terrible liar…

  …or am I?

  What’s your top tip for aspiring authors?

  Keep notes on things: your ideas for titles and plots, your characters, overheard snippets of dialogue. I don’t keep mine in any particular order. It’s just good to know I’ve written them down somewhere.

  What’s your method – regular writing schedule, late at night, listening to music – what inspires the magic for you?

  I keep starting my writing day earlier and earlier so that I can fit everything else in. I think eventually I’ll be getting up at 4 am to write! I like having something on the TV in the background. I read an article that said familiar background noise stops you from daydreaming and I’ve found that to be true: putting on something I’ve watched a million times like Buffy really keeps me focused and also keeps me company while I’m working.

  What’s your favourite pastime (aside from reading/writing)?

  Travelling and reading, which luckily go really well together. Reading a good crime novel and travelling somewhere new seem to me to be the two most thrilling feelings in the world.

  Thank you!

  You can find The American Girl by Kate Horsley available here on eBook.

  Digg this+ Del.icio.us+ Stumble+ Facebook+ Email this+
  Post navigation
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  Q&A with Kate Horsley, author of THE AMERICAN GIRL

  Posted on September 13, 2016 by The Editor
  Category: Interview
  161552-fc50

  What drew you to the world of crime fiction?

  I’ve been obsessed with things that go bump in the night since I can remember. I grew up a house that was rumoured to be haunted by a woman who’d lived there. The bedroom she died in was known as the “red room”: the wallpaper was red and I used to imagine I could see her face in the pattern and wonder how she died. There were also two spectral children who my brothers and I pretended to have tea parties with. The house was also full of crime novels because my mum was writing about them… So, there was no escaping a life of crime in the end.

  What author (besides yourself) do you think that everyone should read?

  H.G. Wells. However often I go back to his books, I’m amazed at how gripping they are. He’s a master not just of the page-turner, but of making every sentence count towards the suspense.

  Tell us about your new book:

  The American Girl tells the story of an exchange student called Quinn Perkins who stumbles out of the woods near a French town. Barefoot and bloodied, her appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family has mysteriously disappeared. Journalist Molly Swift is drawn to the story and will do anything to discover whether Quinn is really an innocent abroad, or a diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder. Molly herself, however, is not entirely to be trusted.

  Did a lot of research go into it?

  I was in France when I came up with the idea for The American Girl and so my research involved visiting places similar to those featured in the book, asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I wrote some of the novel in the bar that La Gorda is based on and it’s just like the club is in the book. Anything I couldn’t find while I was in France, I looked up in a book or on the internet.

  Do you think you could pull off the ‘perfect murder’?

  I love lists and planning, which would help with the “perfect” part and I can be a bit of a neat freak, so that would help with hiding the evidence after the fact. Unfortunately, though, the whole thing might come adrift because I’m such a terrible liar…

  …or am I?

  What’s your top tip for aspiring authors?

  Keep notes on things: your ideas for titles and plots, your characters, overheard snippets of dialogue. I don’t keep mine in any particular order. It’s just good to know I’ve written them down somewhere.

  What’s your method – regular writing schedule, late at night, listening to music – what inspires the magic for you?

  I keep starting my writing day earlier and earlier so that I can fit everything else in. I think eventually I’ll be getting up at 4 am to write! I like having something on the TV in the background. I read an article that said familiar background noise stops you from daydreaming and I’ve found that to be true: putting on something I’ve watched a million times like Buffy really keeps me focused and also keeps me company while I’m working.

  What’s your favourite pastime (aside from reading/writing)?

  Travelling and reading, which luckily go really well together. Reading a good crime novel and travelling somewhere new seem to me to be the two most thrilling feelings in the world.

  Thank you!

  You can find The American Girl by Kate Horsley available here on eBook.

  Digg this+ Del.icio.us+ Stumble+ Facebook+ Email this+
  Post navigation
  ← A brave new world – by Jackie Baldwin, author of DEAD MAN’S PRAYERExclusive first look at KILLING KATE by Alex Lake, bestselling author of After Anna →
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  September 5, 2017
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  August 18, 2017
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  #killerfest15 Agatha Christie Alex Barclay Andrew Taylor Author Author Piece author post Avon blog profile Camilla Läckberg Charles Cumming Cold Killing Competition crime crime and thriller crime fiction Daniel Blake Dean Koontz digital first Fiction Harrogate Homeland interview Jilliane Hoffman Jurassic Park killer readers killer reads Lars Kepler Luke Delaney Mark Sennen Michael Crichton murder paul finch Poirot Pretty Little Things Q&A review Sanctus Simon Toyne SJ Parris Stalkers Stuart MacBride Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival thriller win
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  ShareThis Copy and Paste HOME THE TEAM SIGN UP Q&A with Kate Horsley, author of THE AMERICAN GIRL Posted on September 13, 2016 by The Editor Category: Interview What drew you to the world of crime fiction? I’ve been obsessed with things that go bump in the night since I can remember. I grew up a house that was rumoured to be haunted by a woman who’d lived there. The bedroom she died in was known as the “red room”: the wallpaper was red and I used to imagine I could see her face in the pattern and wonder how she died. There were also two spectral children who my brothers and I pretended to have tea parties with. The house was also full of crime novels because my mum was writing about them… So, there was no escaping a life of crime in the end. What author (besides yourself) do you think that everyone should read? H.G. Wells. However often I go back to his books, I’m amazed at how gripping they are. He’s a master not just of the page-turner, but of making every sentence count towards the suspense. Tell us about your new book: The American Girl tells the story of an exchange student called Quinn Perkins who stumbles out of the woods near a French town. Barefoot and bloodied, her appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family has mysteriously disappeared. Journalist Molly Swift is drawn to the story and will do anything to discover whether Quinn is really an innocent abroad, or a diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder. Molly herself, however, is not entirely to be trusted. Did a lot of research go into it? I was in France when I came up with the idea for The American Girl and so my research involved visiting places similar to those featured in the book, asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I wrote some of the novel in the bar that La Gorda is based on and it’s just like the club is in the book. Anything I couldn’t find while I was in France, I looked up in a book or on the internet. Do you think you could pull off the ‘perfect murder’? I love lists and planning, which would help with the “perfect” part and I can be a bit of a neat freak, so that would help with hiding the evidence after the fact. Unfortunately, though, the whole thing might come adrift because I’m such a terrible liar… …or am I? What’s your top tip for aspiring authors? Keep notes on things: your ideas for titles and plots, your characters, overheard snippets of dialogue. I don’t keep mine in any particular order. It’s just good to know I’ve written them down somewhere. What’s your method – regular writing schedule, late at night, listening to music – what inspires the magic for you? I keep starting my writing day earlier and earlier so that I can fit everything else in. I think eventually I’ll be getting up at 4 am to write! I like having something on the TV in the background. I read an article that said familiar background noise stops you from daydreaming and I’ve found that to be true: putting on something I’ve watched a million times like Buffy really keeps me focused and also keeps me company while I’m working. What’s your favourite pastime (aside from reading/writing)? Travelling and reading, which luckily go really well together. Reading a good crime novel and travelling somewhere new seem to me to be the two most thrilling feelings in the world. Thank you! You can find The American Girl by Kate Horsley available here on eBook. Digg this+ Del.icio.us+ Stumble+ Facebook+ Email this+ Post navigation ← A brave new world – by Jackie Baldwin, author of DEAD MAN’S PRAYERExclusive first look at KILLING KATE by Alex Lake, bestselling author of After Anna → Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Comment Name * Email * Website Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. News, extracts, events, competitions and loads more from the crime and thrillers team at HarperCollins. Search the blog Search for: Write for us. Recently… Extract from Marriage Made Me Do It by Ashley Fontainne September 15, 2017 Guest post by Cass Green, author of In A Cottage In A Wood September 11, 2017 Collins Crime Club September picks September 7, 2017 Exclusive extract from Copycat by Alex Lake September 5, 2017 Q&A with author Alex Day August 18, 2017 The latest on Facebook Let’s read some… #killerfest15 Agatha Christie Alex Barclay Andrew Taylor Author Author Piece author post Avon blog profile Camilla Läckberg Charles Cumming Cold Killing Competition crime crime and thriller crime fiction Daniel Blake Dean Koontz digital first Fiction Harrogate Homeland interview Jilliane Hoffman Jurassic Park killer readers killer reads Lars Kepler Luke Delaney Mark Sennen Michael Crichton murder paul finch Poirot Pretty Little Things Q&A review Sanctus Simon Toyne SJ Parris Stalkers Stuart MacBride Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival thriller win Tweet us! Archives Archives Home The Team ©2016 HarperCollins Publishers UKAboutPrivacy PolicyTerms & ConditionsContact Us created by world archipelago powered by supadü HOME THE TEAM SIGN UP Q&A with Kate Horsley, author of THE AMERICAN GIRL Posted on September 13, 2016 by The Editor Category: Interview What drew you to the world of crime fiction? I’ve been obsessed with things that go bump in the night since I can remember. I grew up a house that was rumoured to be haunted by a woman who’d lived there. The bedroom she died in was known as the “red room”: the wallpaper was red and I used to imagine I could see her face in the pattern and wonder how she died. There were also two spectral children who my brothers and I pretended to have tea parties with. The house was also full of crime novels because my mum was writing about them… So, there was no escaping a life of crime in the end. What author (besides yourself) do you think that everyone should read? H.G. Wells. However often I go back to his books, I’m amazed at how gripping they are. He’s a master not just of the page-turner, but of making every sentence count towards the suspense. Tell us about your new book: The American Girl tells the story of an exchange student called Quinn Perkins who stumbles out of the woods near a French town. Barefoot and bloodied, her appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family has mysteriously disappeared. Journalist Molly Swift is drawn to the story and will do anything to discover whether Quinn is really an innocent abroad, or a diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder. Molly herself, however, is not entirely to be trusted. Did a lot of research go into it? I was in France when I came up with the idea for The American Girl and so my research involved visiting places similar to those featured in the book, asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I wrote some of the novel in the bar that La Gorda is based on and it’s just like the club is in the book. Anything I couldn’t find while I was in France, I looked up in a book or on the internet. Do you think you could pull off the ‘perfect murder’? I love lists and planning, which would help with the “perfect” part and I can be a bit of a neat freak, so that would help with hiding the evidence after the fact. Unfortunately, though, the whole thing might come adrift because I’m such a terrible liar… …or am I? What’s your top tip for aspiring authors? Keep notes on things: your ideas for titles and plots, your characters, overheard snippets of dialogue. I don’t keep mine in any particular order. It’s just good to know I’ve written them down somewhere. What’s your method – regular writing schedule, late at night, listening to music – what inspires the magic for you? I keep starting my writing day earlier and earlier so that I can fit everything else in. I think eventually I’ll be getting up at 4 am to write! I like having something on the TV in the background. I read an article that said familiar background noise stops you from daydreaming and I’ve found that to be true: putting on something I’ve watched a million times like Buffy really keeps me focused and also keeps me company while I’m working. What’s your favourite pastime (aside from reading/writing)? Travelling and reading, which luckily go really well together. Reading a good crime novel and travelling somewhere new seem to me to be the two most thrilling feelings in the world. Thank you! You can find The American Girl by Kate Horsley available here on eBook. Digg this+ Del.icio.us+ Stumble+ Facebook+ Email this+ Post navigation ← A brave new world – by Jackie Baldwin, author of DEAD MAN’S PRAYERExclusive first look at KILLING KATE by Alex Lake, bestselling author of After Anna → Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Comment Name * Email * Website Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. News, extracts, events, competitions and loads more from the crime and thrillers team at HarperCollins. Search the blog Search for: Write for us. Recently… Extract from Marriage Made Me Do It by Ashley Fontainne September 15, 2017 Guest post by Cass Green, author of In A Cottage In A Wood September 11, 2017 Collins Crime Club September picks September 7, 2017 Exclusive extract from Copycat by Alex Lake September 5, 2017 Q&A with author Alex Day August 18, 2017 The latest on Facebook Let’s read some… #killerfest15 Agatha Christie Alex Barclay Andrew Taylor Author Author Piece author post Avon blog profile Camilla Läckberg Charles Cumming Cold Killing Competition crime crime and thriller crime fiction Daniel Blake Dean Koontz digital first Fiction Harrogate Homeland interview Jilliane Hoffman Jurassic Park killer readers killer reads Lars Kepler Luke Delaney Mark Sennen Michael Crichton murder paul finch Poirot Pretty Little Things Q&A review Sanctus Simon Toyne SJ Parris Stalkers Stuart MacBride Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival thriller win Tweet us! Archives Archives Home The Team ©2016 HarperCollins Publishers UKAboutPrivacy PolicyTerms & ConditionsContact Us created by world archipelago powered by supadü ShareThis Copy and Paste

10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506914590098 1/3
Print Marked Items
Horsley, Kate: THE AMERICAN GIRL
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Horsley, Kate THE AMERICAN GIRL Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $15.99 8, 2 ISBN: 978-0-06-243851-5
A reporter and an exchange student fight their way through a dangerous psychological maze in coastal France.The
camera is still running on the video recording German tourists are making of sunrise over the lavender fields in France
when a barefoot and bloodied girl emerges from the woods and is hit by a car. The video goes viral with the plea to help
the #AmericanGirl, and Molly Swift cuts short her holiday to try to get past the other hacks camping outside the
hospital where the girl, identified as Quinn Perkins, lies in a coma. She's a student from Boston who's been living in St.
Roch with the Blavette family on a cultural exchange program. Passing herself off as Quinn's aunt, Molly learns that
the girl's chances of coming out of the coma are 50/50. Molly should be pleased that she's so well-placed to scoop her
competitors and get a story for her podcast, American Confessional, especially since the Blavettes have gone missing
and are therefore good copy. But sympathy for the helpless girl leads her to a more auntlike role than she'd planned. She
finds an ally--and a lover--in Inspector Bertrand Valentin, head of the St. Roch police. Molly asks for Quinn to be
discharged to her care and begins helping the girl piece together her lost memories. A disturbing picture emerges of
Quinn's host family. The father had to sell the family mansion and then disappeared two years ago. The wife was forced
to teach school and take exchange students to make ends meet. The daughter starves and cuts herself. Quinn is obsessed
with the handsome and charming son even though some of his romantic ideas are a little strange. The mystery of a past
student's death, a plea for help sent to Quinn's phone, and the twin caves Les Yeux teach both Molly and Quinn a
terrifying lesson about how deceiving appearances can be. Throughout her novel's shifts in narration and chronology,
Horsley plays the reader as cleverly as she does the characters.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Horsley, Kate: THE AMERICAN GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454176926&it=r&asid=d7d154575b4abe8bf41d151b9924d611.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454176926

---

10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506914590098 2/3
The American Girl
Jane Murphy
Booklist.
112.17 (May 1, 2016): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
* The American Girl. By Kate Horsley. Aug. 2016. 352p. Morrow, paper, $15.99 (9780062438515).
The caves of St. Roch hold many secrets. Their eeriness sets the tone for this compelling psychological thriller. There is
much Poe-like dread and David Lynch-like surrealism in the story of 17-year-old American exchange student Quinn
Perkins, a hit-and-run victim after she stumbles out of the woods near the caves, barefoot and bloodied. The story is
told in two voices. Quinn speaks to us through blog entries dated before and after the event, and crime journalist Molly
Swift, posing as the amnesiac Quinn's aunt, reports to us on her findings. Both women exist in emotional voids
resulting from circumstances surrounding their respective childhoods. Molly and the reader need to decide if Quinn is
an innocent victim or if she is getting away with murder. This book is also something of a morality tale about bad
romantic choices and the dangers of social media. Author Horsley is the cofounder of the online magazine
Crimeculture. Recommend this one to fans of Allison Brennan, Jennifer McMahon, and Wendy Corsi Staub.--Jane
Murphy
YA/M: Sophisticated teen readers will be easily drawn in to 17-year-old Quinns enigmatic tale. JM.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Murphy, Jane. "The American Girl." Booklist, 1 May 2016, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453293577&it=r&asid=e0162b58c2ec221deb1ee326d7c8912d.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453293577

---

10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506914590098 3/3
The American Girl
Publishers Weekly.
263.26 (June 27, 2016): p62.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The American Girl
Kate Horsley. Morrow, $15.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-0624-3851-5
In this gut-wrenching, sometimes gory psychological thriller from Horsley (The Monster's Wife), Quinn Perkins, a 17-
year-old American student who's boarding with a family, the Blavettes, in tiny St. Roch, France, is hospitalized after
emerging from the woods mute and bloody. The Blavettes--mother and father, daughter and son--have disappeared.
Molly Swift, an American journalist working for a sensationalist website back home, poses as a relative and gets into
Quinn's hospital room--and her life. Molly sees a great story but then has scruples about Quinn. Can she protect the girl
from whatever horrors have overtaken her? When the bodies of the Blavettes are discovered, the authorities think
Quinn murdered them. Meanwhile, Molly develops feelings for Valentin, the local policeman. Where does he fit into
the big picture? The narrative alternates between the viewpoints of Quinn and Molly, who has the stronger voice,
creating something of a structural imbalance. Still, this fierce, convoluted tale offers one surprise after another. Agent:
Oli Munson, A.M. Heath (U.K.). (Aug.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The American Girl." Publishers Weekly, 27 June 2016, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456900893&it=r&asid=845a32068bdde2ca485e481e30a4f5fd.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456900893

"Horsley, Kate: THE AMERICAN GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454176926&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Murphy, Jane. "The American Girl." Booklist, 1 May 2016, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453293577&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "The American Girl." Publishers Weekly, 27 June 2016, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456900893&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

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  Review: The American Girl by Kate Horsley
  DAVID CRANMER
  The American Girl by Kate Horsley is a riveting psychological thriller about an American exchange student in France involved in a suspicious accident, and the journalist determined to break the story and uncover the dark secrets a small town is hiding.

  Quinn Perkins, an exchange student in the south of France who’s been rooming with the Blavette family, wakes up in the woods unexpectedly. She then walks to a road and smack dab into the path of an oncoming car, leaving her in a coma. Her plight quickly turns into a media sensation because a vacationing couple had videotaped the accident. #AmericanGirl is trending across the internet and ravenous reporters are camped outside the hospital waiting for an exclusive.

  Soon after awakening, Quinn begins updating her overly introspective blog with detailed posts of her life, continuing them while recovering. The entries are not chronological, jumping back to before the accident, offering insight into what transpired.

  Turns out her French family was not without their thorny issues. The mother has been hosting kids for years for the cold cash and isn’t all that nice. Quinn has fallen for the woman’s handsome, charismatic son to the chagrin of the daughter. We also learn Quinn was being targeted by a stalker whose level of threatening gestures increased, culminating in an alarming video he sent through a popular networking site.

  The film is dark, hard to see, but I hear a noise like heavy breathing. A muffled scream startles me. I grip the phone harder. A girl’s face appears, too close up to see in detail. The film is choppy and moves so fast it's hard to take in before the timer in the top right corner counts down. The girl's breathing hard and there's something—a plastic bag, maybe—stretched over her face. Three ... two ... one, and the screen goes black, the video vanishing forever as Snapchat deletes it and, with it, the girl.

  She turns to her “friends” in her social networking circles for advice, though it’s very possible her demented follower could be one of them. Some of the most effective passages Kate Horsley writes is of this typical 17-year-old student reaching out for help to complete strangers. Very contemporary, very sad commentary on fluctuating human connections, fluctuating social order.

  In a startling occurrence, the entire Blavette family has disappeared, swiftly turning public opinion against Quinn as they suspect her of foul play. Has Ms. Horsley placed us in the hands of an unreliable narrator?

  Well, before you jump ahead, there’s a second narrator in The American Girl named Molly Swift, reporter, who works for American Confessional. Molly and her boss, Bill, take on stories “of police incompetence” and “general corruption.” She manages to convince the nuns at the hospital where Quinn is being treated that she’s the girl’s aunt, and she finagles a visit with the unconscious patient. She uses the opportunity to snoop into Quinn’s cell phone, discovering:

  Qriosity_cat was Quinn apparently. Her reply to the comments made me sad. She’d put so much trust in these virtual acquaintances and not one of them had thought to call the police or do much of anything when she vanished, including visit her.

  Her story—what I’d read of it so far—gave me an uneasy sense that there was an awful lot going on under the surface of life in the Blavette household, and none of it had made it into the papers.

  This is a psychological story with drops of horror mingled in—reminding me of past masters like Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, though, perhaps not as outwardly horrific. (There are hair-raising passages of Quinn investigating a gothic-style school closed due to a suspicious death.) But, like said writing legends, Ms. Horsley knows how to drag you down the trigger warning-laced passageways, crafting excitement the old-fashioned way—with gripping dialog and interpersonal relationships bludgeoned under layers of mystery.

  Major points to Ms. Horsley for traversing social networking, invasive media, and eye-witness accounts of Quinn Perkins. And, the more we hear through these various sources, the less we understand, as it should be with an intellectual riddle whose ending I didn’t thoroughly guess.

  We bounce back and forth between the two women’s narratives and the individual recordings of their accounts that brought them together. Molly and Quinn have similar backgrounds, and every so often, for my ear, the voices blend a bit too much together over the course of the novel. And, for this reviewer—who has been blogging for the better part of the last decade—the Quinn blog posts seem, on occasion, too polished, especially for a young person writing a daily output and seeking instant feedback.

  But, it didn't slow me down from enjoying the puzzle unfolding, and having these confessionals, of sorts, added to the tension and the immediacy of the chronicles.

  I ardently thumbed the Kindle forward arrow, and a big part of the reason for the book’s success is that Quinn’s various blog (and v-blog) entries are happening in the character’s now. When Quinn types, “What do I do, guys? Who do I tell?” you, as the reader, are going to hurriedly turn the pages for the answers—or at least I did.

  I eventually found myself less concerned with how the author constructed her icosahedron and more invested in these two women a long way from home. Ms. Horsley wants to keep us guessing to what is going on—sure sign of a top thriller—and achieves that and then some. Its suspenseful rapids are well piloted, steering characters that each serve a purpose without just being diverting red herrings.

  Kate Horsley has written an excellent novel, very cinematic in approach, something that Alfred Hitchcock would have snatched up back in the day for a feature-length film with a young Tippie Hedren in the role of Molly. And, checking her credits, this is her second effort after a novel called The Monster’s Wife, which was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award—I’m definitely going to snag a copy. I wouldn’t be surprised if The American Girl follows in the footsteps of its predecessor by also competing for awards and landing on year end best lists.

  Read Kate Horsley's exclusive guest post on how traveling to foreign lands can set the stage for a perfect thriller—and find out how to win a copy of The American Girl!

  To learn more or order a copy, visit:

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  David Cranmer aka Edward A. Grainger is the publisher and editor of BEAT to a PULP books and author of The Drifter Detective #7: Torn and Frayed. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

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  5 comments
  Charles Gramlich
  1. cgramlic
  VIEW ALL BY CGRAMLIC | FRIDAY AUGUST 05, 2016 02:30PM EDT
  Sounds intriguing.

  2. Oscar Case
  FRIDAY AUGUST 05, 2016 02:32PM EDT
  Icosahedron, not a common everyday word, and I didn't learn it in my high school geometry class. The book sounds complex and intricate and also interesting.
  David Cranmer
  3. DavidCranmer
  VIEW ALL BY DAVIDCRANMER | FRIDAY AUGUST 05, 2016 02:36PM EDT
  cgramlic, a refreshing read for this reviewer.

  Oscar, my math love is spilling over into my reviews. This carefully constructed narrative is worthy. :)

  4. Prashant C. Trikannad
  SATURDAY AUGUST 06, 2016 03:00AM EDT
  A very engaging review, David. The contemporariness of this thriller is probably why it'd appeal to a lot of readers. I could sense the narrative intensity and pressure building up. The story, set in the backdrop of intrusive digital/social media, would make for a good film, I agree.
  David Cranmer
  5. DavidCranmer
  VIEW ALL BY DAVIDCRANMER | SATURDAY AUGUST 06, 2016 07:47AM EDT
  Thank you, Prashant. And, yes, not every book is a perfect fit for cinema, right? A few classic literary examples would be The Great Gatsby and Ulysses. Awesome books that are difficult to translate but The American Girl unraveled in movielike fashion. Tailor made for the medium.
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• Steph The Bookworm
  http://www.stephthebookworm.com/2016/08/18/review-the-american-girl-by-kate-horsley/
  Word count: 775

  Musings on marriage, motherhood, and my life between books.
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  Review: The American Girl by Kate Horsley
  August 18, 2016 By StephTheBookworm

  Title: The American Girlamerican girl
  Author: Kate Horsley
  Genre/Audience: Fiction, mystery, thriller, adult
  Publication: William Morrow, 2016
  Source: For review, TLC Book Tours

  Whew! This story is the definition of a page turner!

  Quinn is a 17 year old American exchange student spending time in a small French town. One fateful morning, she comes walking out of the woods scared, bloody, and unable to remember what led her there. To top it off, her host family has mysteriously disappeared. Is Quinn responsible, or does it have something to do with the small town’s sinister secrets? Desperate for answers and a shocking story, the media descends upon the town. Among the reporters is American, Molly Swift, who will do anything to get to the bottom of it, including getting way too involved and telling lie after lie.

  I really, really enjoyed this one. It was creepy, mysterious, and incredibly fast paced. The viewpoints alternated between Quinn and Molly, and was told in several formats: blog posts from Quinn leading up to the incident, video diaries from Quinn AFTER the incident, and Molly’s viewpoint in the present. I enjoyed seeing what happened before and what happened after and trying to unravel the mystery and the secrets of the town. I was shocked again and again.

  To say that this story is intriguing would be an understatement. I was sucked in from the get-go and felt an unrelenting need to know what was happening. I’m pretty sure I made that “WHAAAAT?” face several times while reading… you know the one. I found myself constantly second guessing what I thought was going on and was continually puzzled.

  I’d highly recommend this one to fans of mysteries and thrillers — it kept me up late into the night reading on more than one occasion!

  My Rating: 5/5

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  Filed Under: adult, fiction, mystery, reviews, thriller
  6 Comments
  Comments

  Brandie says
  August 18, 2016 at 7:43 am

  Why have I never heard of this book!? It sounds awesome and like something I would love.

  Reply
  Heather J @ TLC Book Tours says
  August 18, 2016 at 8:53 pm

  LOL oh yes, I know that face – I know I’ve MADE that face quite a few times when reading!

  Thanks for being a part of the tour.

  Reply
  Audrey says
  August 19, 2016 at 11:34 am

  Sounds like a good read! I’ve never heard of it and I typically don’t do thrillers, but this one sounds like it’s worth it!

  Reply
  Literary Feline says
  August 22, 2016 at 1:17 pm

  I liked this one quite a bit too, Steph! I didn’t expect the author to go in the direction she did. Very well done.

  Reply
  Trackbacks

  Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl, on tour August 2016 | TLC Book Tours says:
  August 18, 2016 at 8:45 pm
  […] Thursday, August 18th: StephTheBookworm […]

  2016: Year in Books says:
  January 1, 2017 at 8:36 am
  […] The American Girl by Kate Horsley – An incredibly intriguing page turner! I stayed up late into the night reading this creepy, mysterious, and incredibly fast paced novel. […]

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  Hello!
  I’m Steph, a 20-something from Western New York. In short, I am a: wife, mama, reader, writer, librarian, homeowner, sometimes runner / weight loser, and dog mom. I love primitives, finances, Halloween, and all things horror! Welcome to Steph the Bookworm, where I'll share my musings and ramblings on all of the above!
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• Bibliotica
  http://www.bibliotica.com/2016/08/review-the-american-girl-by-kate-horsley/
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  Word count: 2065

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  Book Review: The American Girl by Kate Horsley
  AUGUST 15, 2016 BY LELIA T
  5
  The American GirlThe American Girl
  Kate Horsley
  William Morrow Paperbacks, August 2016
  ISBN 978-0-06-243851-5
  Trade Paperback

  From the publisher—

  From a bright new talent comes a riveting psychological thriller about an American exchange student in France involved in a suspicious accident, and the journalist determined to break the story and uncover the dark secrets a small town is hiding.

  On a quiet summer morning, seventeen-year-old American exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near the small French town of St. Roch. Barefoot, bloodied, and unable to say what has happened to her, Quinn’s appearance creates quite a stir, especially since the Blavettes–the French family with whom she’s been staying–have mysteriously disappeared. Now the media, and everyone in the idyllic village, are wondering if the American girl had anything to do with her host family’s disappearance.

  Though she is cynical about the media circus that suddenly forms around the girl, Boston journalist Molly Swift cannot deny she is also drawn to the mystery and travels to St. Roch. She is prepared to do anything to learn the truth, including lying so she can get close to Quinn. But when a shocking discovery turns the town against Quinn and she is arrested for the murders of the Blavette family, she finds an unlikely ally in Molly.

  As a trial by media ensues, Molly must unravel the disturbing secrets of the town’s past in an effort to clear Quinn’s name, but even she is forced to admit that the American Girl makes a very compelling murder suspect. Is Quinn truly innocent and as much a victim as the Blavettes–or is she a cunning, diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder…?

  Told from the alternating perspectives of Molly, as she’s drawn inexorably closer to the truth, and Quinn’s blog entries tracing the events that led to her accident, The American Girl is a deliciously creepy, contemporary, twisting mystery leading to a shocking conclusion.

  My early reaction to The American Girl was that it reminded me of Amanda Knox, the American who was convicted (later overturned) of murdering her roommate in France, but I don’t mean that it was a rehash. There were just familiar elements—American girl in France accused of killing the French family she was staying with and the ensuing sensational trial—and, in fact, the author has said that this book was partially inspired by that true crime that took up an awful lot of news space.

  Moving on from those similarities, I found the opening chapters filled with tension and a lot of questions and speculation on my part. Quinn doesn’t know what happened to her or to the family and her amnesia adds to the suspense.Then, once suspicion is focused on her, we begin to learn, in small doses, some very creepy goings-on and the dark tone and moodiness of the story drew me in.

  I had some niggling doubts, though, particularly about the nearly incompetent police work that can only be explained somewhat by the small town locale but what really bothered me was that I just didn’t care for any of these people, including the missing family. Even the journalist, Molly, who ostensibly wants to get to the truth and help Quinn, clearly has her own agenda….but, then, so does Quinn and, as a result, neither are people I’d like to hang out with.

  Bottomline, while I have reservations about the characters and some other aspects of the story, there’s no doubt it’s an intriguing if predictable tale and what really happened is very dark, creepy indeed. I never had the urge to quit reading so Ms. Horsley obviously did something right and that makes me think I’m going to want to see more from her.

  Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, August 2016.

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  About the Author

  Kate HorsleyKate Horsley’s first novel, The Monster’s Wife, was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Best British Crime Stories. She coedits Crimeculture, a site dedicated to crime fiction and film offering articles, reviews, and interviews with writers.

  Find out more about Kate at her website, and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+.
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  5 THOUGHTS ON “BOOK REVIEW: THE AMERICAN GIRL BY KATE HORSLEY”

  Patricia Reid August 15, 2016 at 8:03 am
  Putting this on my list of books wanted. Sounds good.

  Like

  Reply
  Holly August 15, 2016 at 8:04 am
  I can see why the story paralleled the story of Amanda Knox, but Amanda’s story unfolded in an Italian court, not a French one. That aside, I was an exchange student once and I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be accused of a crime in one’s host country. Sounds like an intriguing read. Thanks!

  Like

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  skyecaitlin August 15, 2016 at 9:03 am
  I think this sounds good, and I found the Amanda Knox situation to be extremely strange.

  Like

  Reply
  Pingback: Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl, on tour August 2016 | TLC Book Tours
  Heather J. @ TLC August 18, 2016 at 9:46 pm
  This book definitely brought the Amanda Knox story to my mind as well. Even though this story is fictional, clearly things like this DO happen in real life, and that is very scary.

  Thanks for being a part of the tour!

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  Tag: Kate Horsley
  Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl talks with Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire
  the american girlThe American Girl by Kate Horsley is a riveting psychological thriller about an American exchange student in France involved in a suspicious accident—and the dark secrets a small town is hiding. . . .

  On a quiet summer morning seventeen-year-old American exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near the small French town of St. Roch, barefoot, bloodied, and unable to say what has happened to her.

  Quinn’s appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family, the Blavettes, has mysteriously disappeared. Now the media, and everyone in the idyllic village, are wondering if the American girl has anything to do with the missing family.

  Today we’re excited to share a Q&A between Kate Horsley and Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire. They discuss Kate’s inspiration behind the book, character development, and much more!

  Purchase The American Girl from your favorite retailer now.

  Kate Horsley, author of The American Girl talks with Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire

  RW: I know you studied abroad in France when you were younger, and I’m curious whether you’ve been playing around with this idea ever since. If not, what sparked the impulse to return to those experiences and that setting all these years later?

  KH: In my teens, I stayed with a family in a little town just like St Roch. The combination of fevered adolescence and vivid landscape made my visits pretty intense. When I was staying in the South of France more recently, the whole thing came flooding back to me. I looked back at my (very dramatic!) teen diaries of France and Quinn’s story started there.

  RW: This is such an impeccably crafted thriller—every time I thought I knew where it was going, it swerved. How did you manage to design such a finely tuned mystery? Are you a big reader of this kind of story? Are there books or movies that you used as models or inspiration?

  KH: Thank you so much! I’m a huge crime and suspense fiction fan. My mom and I run a fiction and film review site called crimeculture.com, which gives me a great excuse to read all the latest psychological suspense and crime novels and watch series like How To Get Away With Murder, True Detective and Orange Is The New Black for… research purposes.

  RW: In a strange coincidence, I was in France myself when I read your book, and was really impressed by how well you captured the texture of life there. Could you talk about the process of writing about a landscape and culture that isn’t your own? What kinds of research did you do, and how much were you able to draw on your own memories?

  KH: That’s amazing! France is one of my favorite countries to visit. More generally, I love both travel and travel writing: when everything is new and different, my writer-brain lights up like the Fourth of July. My primary research for The American Girl involved visiting places similar to those featured, asking lots of questions and taking copious notes. I wrote some of the novel in the bar that La Gorda is based on and it’s just like the club is in the book, only more so.

  RW: The book is told via alternating points of view, but while Molly’s half of the story is straightforward, Quinn’s life is revealed to us in a fascinating and nonlinear pastiche of video transcripts and blog entries. Was that the plan for Quinn’s chapters from the beginning? What appealed to you about that approach?

  KH: Quinn’s amnesia makes her seem a victim at first, but as the novel continues, doubts about her story grow. Molly is the story’s detective figure, trying to piece together the mystery that is Quinn; to find out whether she’s telling the truth or creating a clever cover story. Fragmented accounts like blogs and video diaries seemed the right way to me convey Quinn’s confusion… or perhaps her duplicity.

  RW: You could read this novel as a fierce indictment of the media and the way our culture treats young women…or, at least, I did! Am I on the right track here about the kinds of pointed questions The American Girl is trying to ask?

  KH: Absolutely. I wanted to explore the way that the paparazzi and social media feed off young women in the spotlight and create powerful distortion fields around cases like these. The media provide the narrative drive of the novel, steering the story around various hairpin bends and pushing Quinn and Molly into some very dark places.

  Posted on August 31, 2016Author Amelia WoodCategories Book Blogs, Book Groups, Books, Reading GroupsTags Girls on Fire, Kate Horsley, Robin Wasserman, The American Girl
  The Summer I Learned to Be Bad in A Different Language by Kate Horsley
  9780062438515The American Girl by Kate Horsley is a riveting psychological thriller about an American exchange student in France involved in a suspicious accident, and the journalist determined to break the story and uncover the dark secrets a small town is hiding. We’re thrilled to be sharing a guest post from Kate on the blog today!

  On a quiet summer morning, seventeen-year-old American exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near the small French town of St. Roch. Barefoot, bloodied, and unable to say what has happened to her, Quinn’s appearance creates quite a stir, especially since the Blavettes—the French family with whom she’s been staying—have mysteriously disappeared. Now the media, and everyone in the idyllic village, are wondering if the American girl had anything to do with her host family’s disappearance.

  Megan Abbott says The American Girl is “a rich, captivating novel you simply can’t put down” and we couldn’t agree more! It’s on sale today, so purchase a copy from your favorite retailer. Thinking of choosing The American Girl for your book club? Check out the Reading Guide here.

  The Summer I Learned to Be Bad in A Different Language

  by Kate Horsley

  One summer in my early teens, my parents decided it would broaden my mind to go stay in France on an exchange. They found a nice family who lived in a little town near the beach and waved me off in the hope that I would come back fluently bilingual. In those days, before teens evolved with mobile phones as a natural extension of their bodies, they must have worried: the town was remote and rustic. The family, though we’d heard they were nice, were complete strangers and my exchange and I didn’t know each other at all.

  Add to that French cigarettes, alcohol, cute local boys on mopeds and the dark woods stretching out beyond the little villa and the trip almost inevitably became a perfect storm of adolescent angst and bad behavior. I changed. Previously a studious, quiet kid, I blazed a trail through those woods, smoking, drinking and devoting myself to mischief, much to the consternation of my host family.

  The whole thing felt like temporary insanity, though the madness left its mark. When I got home, I had the feeling my own family no longer knew me. My adventures had changed me, I told myself. My parents had worried about the dangers of strangers. Maybe they should have worried more about whatever darkness lay under the apparently innocent surface of their teenage daughter and what being miles from home might bring out in her.

  True Crime Inspiration

  Years later, I read (as everyone did) about Amanda Knox and the extensive “trial by media” that dogged her. Like a lot of people, I was transfixed by the case, which was – and still is – a particularly compelling example of a “did she or didn’t she?” murder investigation. It seemed to me that Knox’s free-spiritedness, as well as her coincidentally sketchy blog, worked against her in the public eye and I was interested in the way in which media swirls around a suspect until it’s impossible to ever quite know them or trust their story. Perhaps a person at the center of such a case wouldn’t ever be sure whether they wholly knew themselves.

  That true crime story brought to mind my own teenage experiences far from home. I began to imagine what it would be like to be accused of a horrific crime with no way out of the situation, especially if, like Quinn in The American Girl, you couldn’t remember all the circumstances. I found that my time in France had left a vivid impression and luckily, I still had a diary recording some of my worst excesses.

  My Secret Secret Diary

  I kept a pretty elaborate diary in those days, although it was a pen and ink one rather than a blog. In fact, at one unfortunate point during my stay, my exchange had found the diary and read it. Naturally, this caused mayhem! I’d written all my most excruciatingly honest thoughts about tensions with my exchange and her mother as well my crush on my exchange’s older brother and all this information was communicated to the family.

  I had to stay with them for a final, agonizing week after that. Sister and mother gave me the silent treatment for all of it. They remained so vivid to me that, in the first draft of the book, I wrote using their actual names and the name of the town. One day, my former French exchange sent me a friend request on Facebook and suddenly I saw her – the real her – and the whole family on there. I went back to my manuscript and protected the names of the innocent straight afterwards! That’s how Quinn and Noémie, Emilie and Raphael all came into being.

  The Mysteries of St Roch

  Like Quinn, the town of St Roch is full of secrets. It’s a place partly based on my strangely vivid memories of the little Southern French town I stayed in all those years ago, and partly on Pézenas, an amazing town I stayed in in Languedoc for work a couple of years running. The twisting streets of Pézenas are shaded by tall houses and churches dating back hundreds of years. It’s a very old town, full of historical monuments, but however beautiful, the region surrounding it is also full of run-down gas stations and plagued by high unemployment. The local people depend for their livelihoods on the summer tourists and the English and German ex-pats who have bought up many old family properties and vineyards. I stayed with a British couple whose best friend, a talented gossip, knew everyone and everything and told wonderfully salacious tales about the town’s inhabitants, the local sauerkraut festival and the octogenarian swingers who lived next door. She provided me with as much local color and detail as Marlene provides to Molly.

  Postcards from the Edge

  All this twined together to become my novel, The American Girl, in which exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near a French town. Barefoot and bloodied, her appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family has mysteriously disappeared. Journalist Molly Swift is drawn to the story and will do anything to discover whether Quinn is really an innocent abroad, or a diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder. Molly herself, however, is not entirely to be trusted…

  While I was working on the book, I always asked anyone new I ran into about their travellers’ tales, especially youthful ones. Did they experience culture shock? Did they cause it? Did anything disastrous happen? What about their trips abroad stayed with them the most? I heard lots of amazing stories and some unnerving ones. I still ask the questions, because the answers never fail to fascinate me and provide me with new ways of seeing the world. What is the most memorable trip you’ve taken? Answers on a postcard please!

  Posted on August 2, 2016July 25, 2016Author Amelia WoodCategories Book Blogs, Book Groups, Books, Reading GroupsTags Kate Horsley, Suspense Fiction, The American Girl, Thriller Fiction
  Copyright © 2017 HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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  This Summer, Girls in Titles and Girls in Peril
  By ALEXANDRA ALTERMAY 26, 2016
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  Related: 12 New Books We’re Reading This Summer (and 6 Not So New)

  For a while, it seemed as if slapping the word “girl” on a title virtually guaranteed best-seller status. There was, of course, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which kicked off his blockbuster crime series. Then came Gillian Flynn’s twisted domestic thriller, “Gone Girl,” which featured a charming sociopath named Amy and sold nearly nine million copies in the United States alone, thoroughly debunking the notion that readers prefer “likable” female characters. Last year, the mantle was passed to “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins, an addictively paced suspense novel that has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide.

  But this year, not a single “girl” title has captivated millions of readers in the same way. Sure, there were Kate Hamer’s suspense novel, “The Girl in the Red Coat,” about an 8-year-old’s disappearance, and Monica Hesse’s historical thriller, “Girl in the Blue Coat,” about a teenager’s disappearance in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Both novels pulled in stellar reviews, but neither broke out in a major way, certainly not enough to knock “The Girl on the Train” off its throne.

  Now it looks as if the seasonal drought is over. “Girl” books seem destined to be big this summer, with several juicy and suspenseful novels arriving during the next few months. And while their titles may seem formulaic at this point, their plots and prose often wreak havoc on the tired trope of girls in peril.

  In her debut novel, “The Girls,” Emma Cline explores the uncanny appeal of a religious cult for girls seeking refuge from moral uncertainty. Set in Northern California in the late 1960s, the narrative unfolds as an unhappy teenager, Evie, is sucked into a Charles Manson-like cult, seduced by the blissed-out, feral girls in the commune leader’s entourage. Lonely and insecure, Evie follows them like a stray to the farm, where they live in squalor, and tries to ignore undercurrents of violence and sexual abuse.

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  Ms. Cline was all of 25 when the manuscript set off a bidding war among 12 publishers in the fall of 2014. Random House bought it in a three-book, seven-figure deal, and the producer Scott Rudin optioned the film rights. The novel has been lavishly praised by writers like Jennifer Egan, who called Ms. Cline “a thrilling new voice in American fiction,” and Richard Ford.

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  With all the hype, Ms. Cline’s book, out June 14, seems to have a good shot at becoming the must-read novel of the summer. But summer is a crowded publishing season, and “The Girls” faces competition from a number of other compelling novels with partly overlapping titles and themes, including Robin Wasserman’s “Girls on Fire,” Megan Miranda’s “All the Missing Girls,” David Swinson’s “The Second Girl” and Kate Horsley’s “The American Girl.”

  It’s hardly a spoiler to note that in each of these novels, bad things happen to girls. Occasionally, and refreshingly, girls also do bad things to other people. In “Girls on Fire” (Harper, May 17), Ms. Wasserman explores the line where close female friendships can blur into obsession and self-obliteration. The novel opens in small-town Pennsylvania in 1991, when a popular high school basketball player’s body is found in the woods with a bullet in his head, stirring panic about satanic worship. At the heart of the dark story is an intoxicating and all-consuming friendship between two teenage girls, the lonely Hannah Dexter and a magnetic new girl, Lacey, a rebellious, Nirvana-loving grunge groupie who flirts with Satanism.

  Female friendship is also a central theme of Ms. Miranda’s intricately plotted thriller “All the Missing Girls” (Simon & Schuster, June 28). The novel opens as a young woman named Nic returns to her hometown, a decade after her best friend disappeared. Nic has been back in town only a few days when another young woman goes missing. Ms. Miranda brings heightened suspense and a twist to this familiar scenario by telling the story, which unfolds over 15 days, in reverse chronological order.

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  More girls go missing in “The Second Girl” (Mulholland Books, June 7), a hotly anticipated thriller by David Swinson, a retired Washington police detective. The novel, which kicks off a new detective series, features an investigator who becomes a hero when he happens upon a kidnapped teenage girl during a stakeout of a drug dealer’s house. He’s recruited to find another missing girl and worries that the high-profile assignment will expose his cocaine addiction.

  In Ms. Horsley’s novel “The American Girl” (William Morrow, Aug. 2), a teenage girl reappears (finally) rather than disappearing at the outset. She staggers out of the woods, bloody and disoriented, with no recollection of what has happened to her. As a journalist investigates, questions swirl over whether the girl, an American exchange student in France, is the victim of a crime or a murderer herself.

  With the proliferation of “girl” titles, there are signs that the trend may have peaked; it already seems ripe for parody. The comedian Amy Schumer is leading the charge with her much-hyped memoir, out Aug. 16 from Gallery Books, which explores her childhood, her family relationships, feminism and how she broke into comedy. She’s titled it “The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo.”

  A version of this article appears in print on May 27, 2016, on Page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: Hot Days, Cool Reads. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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• Reads and Knits
  http://www.readsandknits.com/2017/06/book-review-american-girl-by-kate.html
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  READS & KNITS
  BOOK REVIEWS SPANNING SCIENCE FICTION, CONTEMPORARY FICTION, HISTORICAL FICTION, MYSTERY/THRILLER, BRITISH FICTION AND THE OCCASIONAL YA TITLE. ALSO THE OCCASIONAL MENTION OF THINGS I DO WITH YARN.
  HOMEBOOK REVIEWSKNITSSHOPBUY IT NOW
  Book Review: The American Girl by Kate Horsley
  JUNE 12, 2017

  The American Girl by Kate Horsley
  My rating: 3 of 5 stars
  Publisher: William Morrow

  Summary: On a quiet summer morning seventeen-year-old American exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near the small French town of St. Roch, barefoot, bloodied, and unable to say what has happened to her.

  Quinn's appearance creates a stir, especially since her host family, the Blavettes, has mysteriously disappeared. Now the media, and everyone in the idyllic village, are wondering if the American girl has anything to do with the missing family.

  A Boston reporter named Molly Swift travels to St. Roch, prepared to do anything to learn the truth and score the ultimate scoop. After Quinn is arrested and a trial by media ensues, she finds an unlikely ally in the young journalist. Molly unravels the disturbing secrets of the town's past in an effort to clear Quinn's name, but even she is forced to admit that the American girl makes a compelling suspect.

  Is Quinn truly an innocent abroad, or is she a cunning, diabolical killer intent on getting away with murder?

  This began so very strong with Quinn, the American study abroad student who stumbles out of a copse of trees into the road and is promptly run down by a hit and run driver. The principal mystery of what's happened to her was solid. Enter Molly, podcast reporter, who surreptitiously gains access as Quinn's "aunt". to the hospital where Quinn is convalescing. Add in more layers with a dying resort town with some serious creep and organized crime, some eerie caves and a dead girl. This is a great setup and sadly it didn't fully deliver for me. And the final resolution left me incredulous.

  Somewhere around a third of the way in, the tension falls off a bit and this meandered more than was necessary. This definitely straddled the line of my patience where I almost didn't give a damn about the central mystery and I tend to have a lot of patience for mysteries. By three quarters of the way in, I pretty much ceased caring deeply and just wanted to know if my suspicions were correct.

  I'd say that if you never read it, you'll still have lived a full life but it isn't a bad book at all. It's a twisty story with a few mysteries but the suspense just evaporated. This one just didn't live up to my expectations. Neutral on recommendation.

  POSTED BY ANISSA ANNALISE AT 9:30 AM
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  LABELS: BOOK REVIEWS, MYSTERY/THRILLER
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  About MeHi! I'm Anissa, lover of fiction & conjurer of yarn. I read 1-2 books per week and review them & while I love ARCs, I'm also a believer in showing the backlist of my TBR list, some love. I sometimes receive review copies from publishers which in no way sways my opinions of them.
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