What to do in Baltimore when your best friend forever is dead
In the infancy of the internet, getting an email was a novel experience. These days, when emails seem to flood in by the second, the reverse is true. Receiving a piece of correspondence signed, sealed and delivered by the postal system feels like the most thrilling part of the day. That is unless that coveted piece of snail mail contains only a trinket that once belonged to friend who was killed nearly three decades prior.
Although she may wish to return the creepy parcel to sender, Heather Cole, child psychologist and leading lady of “The Dead Girls Club,” the new thriller from Damien Angelica Walters, instead falls down a proverbial rabbit hole of haunting memories. The only thing keeping her mentally present is the current threat she knows she now faces. That’s because Heather knows for certain that the necklace — one half of a best friend’s heart — couldn’t have been sent by its original owner. How does she know this? Because Heather killed the girl herself, upon request. Whoever sent this necklace not only knows what she’s done but also must have been there the night that she did it.
Flashback scenes take us back to Baltimore in 1991 when Heather and her group of friends meet in a vacant house late at night to sate their spooky preteen fascinations with tales of murders and monsters. In these sessions, the necklace owner, Becca, begins to get increasingly pushy about her ghost of choice, insisting to the other girls that her beloved Red Lady is no story, but a presence in the room with them. Shackled to a rough home situation, Becca seems to need this spirit to be real as she craves help the living don’t seem willing to provide.
Heather, in the present day sections, makes no secret that her history with Becca, from the sisterly closeness in the beginning, through the teenage spats in between, to the eventual guilt over Becca’s tragic end by her own hands, drove her as an adult to a career within child psychology; in many ways, her choice of work seems to be scratching a deeply rooted psychological itch to save other children where she couldn’t save Becca, even from herself. Her constantly present, aching remorse has the power to force readers to question their own allegiance: Are we really empathizing with the character we’ve known has been the killer since the first chapter?
Such an internally conflicted reading experience nicely suits the book’s tone. Although the meat of the book is the search for the identity of this longdormant witness, the true reckoning is within Heather’s mind. Lulled into a 20-plus-year sense that the threat has passed, in an instant she is transported back to the worst day of her life. The looming threat of being exposed as a killer shakes her foundation.
“The Dead Girls Club” is especially eerie thanks to the exposure of the threatening within the doldrums of suburban normalcy. Heather’s hunt for this mysterious witness turns sinister. Heather’s breakdown gives the reader the scary sense that a descent into desperation may not be as self-evident as one would like to think.
Stepping into Heather’s shoes for the duration of this book is to associate with an admitted killer, but she’s not the dead-eyed type of sociopath one may expect or crave. In Heather’s narrative, readers will recognize enough of their own challenges within marriages and careers yet will feel their own desperation to uncover the real story behind her teenage crime. In “The Dead Girls Club,” Ms. Walters has written a modern tale destined to pull thriller lovers through cold winter nights. Although, it must be said, those same readers will likely never look at their mailboxes the same way again.