Author Jacqueline Bublitz’s debut novel, Before You Knew My Name, left readers enthralled by its exquisitely crafted mystery and touched by its focus on female agency. Now, she’s returning with another gripping whodunnit that puts the murderer’s victims front and center. Leave the Girls Behind follows a young woman haunted by the heinous crimes of a serial killer as she embarks on a desperate quest for justice. Here’s everything you need to know before it drops on October 29!
Synopsis
Five years after a nervous breakdown forced her to drop out of college, Ruth-Ann Baker is still putting the pieces of her life back together. On the surface, she’s an average 26-year-old working as a bartender in New York City. But in reality, Ruth is haunted by the ghosts of her past — literally. Nineteen years ago, Ruth’s best friend was murdered by suspected serial killer Ethan Oswald. Now, his victims speak to Ruth from beyond the grave, urging her to get justice for those of them whose cases were never solved.
Thus, when another little girl goes missing from Ruth’s hometown, she can’t help but think of the long-dead Oswald, whose past crimes bear striking resemblance to this latest disappearance. And when her online sleuthing uncovers evidence that Oswald had a partner in crime, Ruth resolves to track down the accomplice. Her global investigation brings her into contact with three different women, one of whom she suspects is connected to the missing girl — and her friend’s death. As Ruth gets closer to the truth, she’ll learn that some people would do anything to keep their secrets buried.
A Fiercely Feminist Take on Crime Fiction
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dirge Without Music from Collected Poems
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
In Leave the Girls Behind, Jacqueline Bublitz stretches the boundaries of the thriller genre, delivering a compulsive but compassionate mystery that tackles a myriad of real-world issues with nuance and care.
Bublitz’s novels provide all the twists and turns expected of a murder mystery, with one key difference that sets them apart from other works of crime fiction. She isn’t interested in the sensationalistic horror of the perpetrators’ twisted minds and grisly crimes. Instead, Bublitz’s stories center around the victims of these appalling acts, demonstrating the power of violence to destroy countless lives.
As a companion to her debut, Bublitz’s stunning sophomore novel expands on the themes of trauma, female solidarity, and our cultural callousness toward “dead girls” to tell a wholly new but equally important story of resilience and healing. With the recent explosion of true crime narratives in popular media, Bublitz’s victim-centered perspective is needed now more than ever. Her books are proof that there’s a way to portray harrowing accounts like Ruth’s without glorifying serial killers or exploiting victims and their loved ones.
A masterclass in empathetic storytelling, Leave the Girls Behind gives women rightful ownership over their own narratives, denying abusers the last word once and for all.
A Look at the Lasting Consequences of Trauma
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy
Bublitz’s latest novel paints a piercingly vivid picture of what it means to live with trauma. For the story’s protagonist, Ruth, the memory of a distressing event from her childhood is an inescapable torment. As Ruth goes through her daily routine, we witness the immeasurable ways her trauma manifests itself: She’s grown distant from her parents, who refuse to talk to her about the incident. She sleeps on the floor rather than in her bed because she fears someone will peep through her bedroom window at night. She’s terrified to leave home without her hound dog and collection of self-defense weapons as protection. She sees dead girls and risks her life trying to avenge them.
For Ruth and many others, trauma means always looking over your shoulder. It means never being able to let your guard down. It means struggling to make connections because you can’t trust people’s intentions, which you know are too often sinister, no matter how harmless they appear. Once you’ve experienced the horror of violence, it’s nearly impossible to see the good in anyone or anything. Ruth’s worldview is forever warped by her trauma, the lively little girl she used to be forever erased.
This devastating depiction of recovery reveals just how challenging moving on can be, even with a support system by your side. Yet, it instills hope that, in time, those plagued by trauma can find the happiness and ease of mind they deserve.
A Tribute to the “Imperfect” Victims
There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When it comes to the victims of violent crimes, society would have you believe that not all deaths weigh the same. In the hierarchy of victimhood perpetuated by the media, only the “perfect” victims matter. Ruth’s deceased childhood friend, Beth Lovely, is one such “perfect” victim: beautiful, white, and middle-class. But Beth’s murderer, Ethan Oswald, had other victims, ones who went unnoticed because they didn’t fit the “perfect” victim mold. They were poor kids from broken families, not the kind of girls that arouse sympathy from the public. Hence, their cases were swept under the rug, their losses deemed less tragic than Beth’s.
Leave the Girls Behind shatters this hierarchy of suffering, declaring that all victims matter — even the “imperfect” ones. Bublitz utilizes statistics to reinforce this point, highlighting the fact that crime disproportionately affects marginalized communities that fall under the “imperfect” victim label. Her book is an homage to anyone whose suffering has been minimized to make room for that of those society considers more worthy of their pity.
A Scathing Rebuke of Society’s Villainization of Women
The evil that men do lives after them;
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Bublitz pulls no punches in her critique of society’s true crime obsession. She sheds a damning light on the inherent insensitivity of the genre, as well as the harmful practices that come along with it: How we use the tragic stories of dead girls and women as entertainment, all while centering the violent men who victimized them in these narratives. How we silence and shame female survivors for the part they supposedly played in their own trauma but excuse their male assailants’ transgressions as mistakes. How we deify serial killers but demonize their wives, who are often victims themselves. How we accuse young girls — still children — of seducing grown men instead of condemning predators for their abuses.
With the righteous rage of every maligned woman, this story takes the culture of misogyny and victim blaming to task, reminding readers that women should not bear the blame for men’s malevolence.
Final Thoughts
Leave the Girls Behind is an engaging and affecting tale about confronting unresolved trauma, letting go of survivor’s guilt, and the grueling but necessary fight to bring justice to those society forgets. A trailblazer of the modern thriller genre, Jacqueline Bublitz joins legendary authors like Jessica Knoll and Gillian Flynn on the path toward a more feminist and victim-centric approach to crime fiction. With her growing body of work, Bublitz continues to pave the way for a new kind of murder mystery, one that reckons with our reverence for wicked men and our apathy toward women’s oppression.
You’ll love Leave the Girls Behind if you enjoyed these titles:
- All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers
- Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
- The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
- None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Bookstr’s Leave the Girls Behind Dream Cast:
- Rachel Sennott as Ruth-Ann Baker, citizen detective
- Kiernan Shipka as Beth Lovely, Ruth’s dead best friend
- Jessica Rothe as Amity Greene, a flamboyant New York socialite
- Emily Blunt as Rose Mulvaney, a haunted mother of two
- Sadie Sink as Juno Mulvaney, Rose’s fierce eldest daughter
- Allison Janney as Helen Torrent, the mysterious wife of the infamous Babysitter Killer
Final Score: 4.5/5
If you want to add Leave the Girls Behind to your TBR, you can preorder it on Bookshop and Amazon! Thank you to Atria Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
For another Bookstr starred review, click here!
To browse more books like this, check out Bookstr’s Mystery shelf on Bookshop!
