Nice Girls by Catherine Dang

Nice Girls by Catherine Dang
My Rating: ★★★★

I received a copy from William Morrow through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

After escaping Liberty Lake thanks to a scholarship, Mary almost had it all. She lost weight, was close to graduating from an Ivy League, had many friends, and had no plans to return to the city escaped. Then she finally let out all the anger she’d been keeping in, leading to her expulsion. Mary finds herself back in Liberty Lake with student loans breathing down her neck as she works a minimum wage job when her former childhood friend, Olivia, goes missing. With nothing better to do, Mary finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed with the case, especially when she becomes convinced that there’s a serial killer involved.

Narrated by Mary, we follow her from the moment her dad arrives to help her move out of her dorm room. Lonely, angry, depressed, and ashamed, she doesn’t tell anyone the real reason she’s not at school. Not even her best friend. We spend a lot of time in her head learning why she’s angry and depressed. The more we get to know Mary, the more it becomes apparent that she has had anger issues for a long time and is obsessed with fitting with her peers while being better than them. She’s not a likable character, but she is interesting to follow as she continues to stick her foot dog poop everywhere she goes.

For someone who doesn’t want to call attention to herself or get involved in what’s going on, Mary sure does like to play amateur sleuth. It was interesting to see her make a connection between DeMaria Jackson’s murder and Olivia’s disappearance before anyone else did. However, Mary does call attention to herself a lot more than she thinks she did, and she certainly made life very bad for a character who wasn’t involved in the murders. I think the fact that she’s far from being a detective and makes mistakes left and right is realistic, but I do think that the extent of her investigation does require readers to suspend belief as the story continues.

All in all, I think it’s a great story. I also like that it has an open ending, but that there’s enough information that I know exactly what happened to Mary after the final chapter. I’m excited to see what Catherine Dang publishes next because she had me glued to every page of this book.