Lost Girls: An American Mystery
(eBook)

The New York Times bestseller-With an Afterword and a New Epilogue by the Author A New York Times Notable Book-Now a Netflix Film "Meticulously reported and beautifully written . . . a haunting and powerful crime story that gives voice to those who can no longer be heard."-David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager "Rich, tragic . . . monumental . . . true-crime reporting at its best."-Washington Post One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert ran through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life and was never seen again. No one thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene-of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention-until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan's. There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppauge, Long Island, just a month after Shannon's disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite, in their twenties, and had come from out of town to work as escorts, and they all had advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage. Lost Girls is a portrait of the victims of the Long Island Serial Killer, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them. Long considered "one of the best true-crime books of all time" (Time), this editionfeatures an afterword including the shocking fate of Mari Gilbert, Shannan's mother, for whom this case became the crusade of a lifetime, a new epilogue covering the most recent developments in the Long Island Serial Killer case, including the arrest, the missteps of the police investigation, and an updated timeline. "Meticulously reported and beautifully written, Robert Kolker's Lost Girls is a haunting and powerful crime story that gives voice to those who can no longer be heard. It is a story that you will not be able to forget." - David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon "Immensely evocative . . . we are left with is a visceral understanding of the lives of the victims and why they should have mattered more." - New York Daily News “Kolker is a careful writer and {he paints} a far more nuanced picture of each young woman than any screaming headline could.” - Miami Herald “Through extensive interviews with the victims' families and friends, Kolker creates compassionate portraits of the murdered young women, and uncovers the forces that drove them from their respective home towns into risky, but lucrative, careers as prostitutes in a digital age.” - New Yorker “Captivating.” - Boston Globe “Robert Kolker unflinchingly probes the 21st-century innovations that facilitated these crimes… ...An important examination of the socioeconomic and cultural forces that can shape a woman's entry into prostitution.” - Kirkus Reviews “Beautifully and provocatively {Lost Girls} will make all but the hardest-hearted empathetic. Add a baffling whodunit that remains, as the subtitle indicates, unsolved, and you have a captivating true crime narrative that's sure to win new converts and please longtime fans of the genre.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Robert Kolker's LOST GIRLS is reportage at the highest level; it's miss-your-bedtime storytelling… It's a wonder." - Darin Strauss, author of Half A Life “Lost Girls is a