当卡米莉家乡的几名女孩被谋杀后，由于工作的原因，她被迫回到那个古老南方贵族与吸毒青年共同生活的地方。随着卡米莉揭露杀害那些女孩的凶手以及杀人动机的谜底，《利器》这个故事使读者在心理上产生了深度困扰：卡米莉为何如此坚定地去调查这些被害的女孩？卡米莉与她母亲之间发生了什么？这件事是怎样与多年前她另一个妹妹的死联系到一起的？
When two girls are abducted and killed in Missouri,
journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her home town to report
on the crimes.
Long-haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged from her
mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed once
again in her family''s mansion, reacquainting herself with her
distant mother and the half-sister she barely knows - a precocious
13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town.
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent
crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims - a
bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille
to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the
story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what
happened to her years before if she wants to survive this
homecoming.
When two girls are abducted and killed in Missouri,
journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her home town to report
on the crimes. Long-haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged
from her mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed
once again in her family''s mansion, reacquainting herself with her
distant mother and the half-sister she barely knows - a precocious
13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town. As Camille
works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds
herself identifying with the young victims - a bit too strongly.
Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the
psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by
her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her
years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.
目前已出版三部小说，均受到文坛与媒体的大力好评，更是凭借《消失的爱人》一跃跻身美国最畅销书作家之列，文坛巨匠如史蒂芬·金、哈兰·科本、薇儿·麦克德米德等均盛赞她深厚的写作功底。处女作“Sharp
Objects”即入围“爱伦·坡奖”决选，并创下了史上首度同时获得两座英国匕首奖的罕见记录。“Dark
Places”和《消失的爱人》则双双荣登《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜。
Gillian Flynn was the chief TV critic for ENTERTAINMENT
WEEKLY. She is the author of two novels - SHARP OBJECTS and DARK
PLACES.
內容試閱：
Chapter One
My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly. It was May 12 but the
temperature had dipped to the forties, and after four days
shivering in my shirtsleeves, I grabbed cover at a tag sale rather
than dig through my boxed-up winter clothes. Spring in
Chicago.
In my gunny-covered cubicle I sat staring at the computer screen.
My story for the day was a limp sort of evil. Four kids, ages two
through six, were found locked in a room on the South Side with a
couple of tuna sandwiches and a quart of milk. They''d been left
three days, flurrying like chickens over the food and feces on the
carpet. Their mother had wandered off for a suck on the pipe and
just forgotten. Sometimes that''s what happens. No cigarette burns,
no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping. I''d seen the mother
after the arrest: twenty-two-year-old Tammy Davis, blonde and fat,
with pink rouge on her cheeks in two perfect circles the size of
shot glasses. I could imagine her sitting on a shambled-down sofa,
her lips on that metal, a sharp burst of smoke. Then all was fast
floating, her kids way behind, as she shot back to junior high,
when the boys still cared and she was the prettiest, a
glossy-lipped thirteen-year-old who mouthed cinnamon sticks before
she kissed.
A belly. A smell. Cigarettes and old coffee. My editor, esteemed,
weary Frank Curry, rocking back in his cracked Hush Puppies. His
teeth soaked in brown tobacco saliva.
"Where are you on the story, kiddo?" There was a silver tack on my
desk, point up. He pushed it lightly under a yellow
thumbnail.
"Near done." I had two inches of copy. I needed six.
"Good. Fuck her, file it, and come to my office."
"I can come now."
"Fuck her, file it, then come to my office."
"Fine. Ten minutes." I wanted my thumbtack back.
He started out of my cubicle. His tie swayed down near his
crotch.
"Preaker?"
"Yes, Curry?"
"Fuck her."
Frank Curry thinks I''m a soft touch. Might be because I''m a woman.
Might be because I''m a soft touch.
Curry''s office is on the third floor. I''m sure he gets
panicky-pissed every time he looks out the window and sees the
trunk of a tree. Good editors don''t see bark; they see leaves--if
they can even make out trees from up on the twentieth, thirtieth
floor. But for the Daily Post, fourth-largest paper in Chicago,
relegated to the suburbs, there''s room to sprawl. Three floors will
do, spreading relentlessly outward, like a spill, unnoticed among
the carpet retailers and lamp shops. A corporate developer produced
our township over three well-organized years--1961-64--then named
it after his daughter, who''d suffered a serious equestrian accident
a month before the job was finished. Aurora Springs, he ordered,
pausing for a photo by a brand-new city sign. Then he took his
family and left. The daughter, now in her fifties and fine except
for an occasional tingling in her arms, lives in Arizona and
returns every few years to take a photo by her namesake sign, just
like Pop.
I wrote the story on her last visit. Curry hated it, hates most
slice-of-life pieces. He got smashed off old Chambord while he read
it, left my copy smelling like raspberries. Curry gets drunk fairly
quietly, but often. It''s not the reason, though, that he has such a
cozy view of the ground. That''s just yawing bad luck.
I walked in and shut the door to his office, which isn''t how I''d
ever imagined my editor''s office would look. I craved big oak
panels, a window pane in the door--marked Chief--so the cub
reporters could watch us rage over First Amendment rights. Curry''s
office is bland and institutional, like the rest of the building.
You could debate journalism or get a Pap smear. No one cared.
"Tell me about Wind Gap." Curry held the tip of a ballpoint pen at
his grizzled chin. I could picture the tiny prick of blue it would
leave among the stubble.
"It''s at the very bottom of Missouri, in the boot heel. Spitting
distance from Tennessee and Arkansas," I said, hustling for my
facts. Curry loved to drill reporters on any topics he deemed
pertinent--the number of murders in Chicago last year, the
demographics for Cook County, or, for some reason, the story of my
hometown, a topic I preferred to avoid. "It''s been around since
before the Civil War," I continued. "It''s near the Mississippi, so
it was a port city at one point. Now its biggest business is hog
butchering. About two thousand people live there. Old money and
trash."
"Which are you?"
"I''m trash. From old money." I smiled. He frowned.
"And what the hell is going on?"
I sat silent, cataloguing various disasters that might have
befallen Wind Gap. It''s one of those crummy towns prone to misery:
A bus collision or a twister. An explosion at the silo or a toddler
down a well. I was also sulking a bit. I''d hoped--as I always do
when Curry calls me into his office--that he was going to
compliment me on a recent piece, promote me to a better beat, hell,
slide over a slip of paper with a 1 percent raise scrawled on
it--but I was unprepared to chat about current events in Wind
Gap.
"Your mom''s still there, right, Preaker?"
"Mom. Stepdad." A half sister born when I was in college, her
existence so unreal to me I often forgot her name. Amma. And then
Marian, always long-gone Marian.
"Well dammit, you ever talk to them?" Not since Christmas: a
chilly, polite call after administering three bourbons. I''d worried
my mother could smell it through the phone lines.
"Not lately."
"Jesus Christ, Preaker, read the wires sometime. I guess there was
a murder last August? Little girl strangled?"
I nodded like I knew. I was lying. My mother was the only person in
Wind Gap with whom I had even a limited connection, and she''d said
nothing. Curious.
"Now another one''s missing. Sounds like it might be a serial to me.
Drive down there and get me the story. Go quick. Be there tomorrow
morning."
No way. "We got horror stories here, Curry."
"Yeah, and we also got three competing papers with twice the staff
and cash." He ran a hand through his hair, which fell into frazzled
spikes. "I''m sick of getting slammed out of news. This is our
chance to break something. Big."
Curry believes with just the right story, we''d become the overnight
paper of choice in Chicago, gain national credibility. Last year
another paper, not us, sent a writer to his hometown somewhere in
Texas after a group of teens drowned in the spring floods. He wrote
an elegiac but well-reported piece on the nature of water and
regret, covered everything from the boys'' basketball team, which
lost its three best players, to the local funeral home, which was
desperately unskilled in cleaning up drowned corpses. The story won
a Pulitzer.
I still didn''t want to go. So much so, apparently, that I''d wrapped
my hands around the arms of my chair, as if Curry might try to pry
me out. He sat and stared at me a few beats with his watery hazel
eyes. He cleared his throat, looked at his photo of his wife, and
smiled like he was a doctor about to break bad news. Curry loved to
bark--it fit his old-school image of an editor--but he was also one
of the most decent people I knew.
"Look, kiddo, if you can''t do this, you can''t do it. But I think it
might be good for you. Flush some stuff out. Get you back on your
feet. It''s a damn good story--we need it. You need it."
Curry had always backed me. He thought I''d be his best reporter,
said I had a surprising mind. In my two years on the job I''d
consistently fallen short of expectations. Sometimes strikingly.
Now I could feel him across the desk, urging me to give him a
little faith. I nodded in what I hoped was a confident
fashion.
"I''ll go pack." My hands left sweatprints on the chair.
I had no pets to worry about, no plants to leave with a neighbor.
Into a duffel bag, I tucked away enough clothes to last me five
days, my own reassurance I''d be out of Wind Gap before week''s end.
As I took a final glance around my place, it revealed itself to me
in a rush. The apartment looked like a college kid''s: cheap,
transitory, and mostly uninspired. I promised myself I''d invest in
a decent sofa when I returned as a reward for the stunning story I
was sure to dig up.
On the table by the door sat a photo of a preteen me holding Marian
at about age seven. We''re both laughing. She has her eyes wide open
in surprise, I have mine scrunched shut. I''m squeezing her into me,
her short skinny legs dangling over my knees. I can''t remember the
occasion or what we were laughing about. Over the years it''s become
a pleasant mystery. I think I like not knowing.
I take baths. Not showers. I can''t handle the spray, it gets my
skin buzzing, like someone''s turned on a switch. So I wadded a
flimsy motel towel over the grate in the shower floor, aimed the
nozzle at the wall, and sat in the three inches of water that
pooled in the stall. Someone else''s pubic hair floated by.
I got out. No second towel, so I ran to my bed and blotted myself
with the cheap spongy blanket. Then I drank warm bourbon and cursed
the ice machine.
Wind Gap is about eleven hours south of Chicago. Curry had
graciously allowed me a budget for one night''s motel stay and
breakfast in the morning, if I ate at a gas station. But once I got
in town, I was staying at my mother''s. That he decided for me. I
already knew the reaction I''d get when I showed up a...
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