Whidbey

<p><b>'In the realm of Patricia Highsmith and <i>Gone Girl</i>' Chelsea Bieker</b><br><b>'A masterpiece' Carmen Maria Machado</b><br><b>----</b><br><b>You want to know who did it, but that was never the question. Or, it was never the right one.</b><br><br>Birdie Chang doesn't know much about Whidbey Island, only that it is far. On the ferry, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger, where she finds herself telling him everythin how she was sexually abused as a child, how the perpetrator now walks free, how the calls and emails from him haven't stopped and she is on the run; how she wants to kill him. The stranger poses a shocking question - if she agrees, he will murder the man who hurt her, with no strings attached. She gives him a name.<br><br>On the other side of the country, Mary-Beth receives a phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered. What follows is a complex story of three women connected through one man: Birdie, a woman on the run from her past and her abuser; Mary-Beth, the abuser's loving mother; and Linzie, a former reality star turned bestselling memoirist, and another victim of the same man.<br><br><i>Whidbey </i>is a gripping whodunnit and a searingly perceptive and astonishingly original novel that asks the crucial question of who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?<br><br><b>Women are rarely in receipt of what they are owed.</b></p>