Love her or loathe her, Libby Day won't be forgotten without a fight. The embittered antiheroine of Gillian Flynn's nerve-fraying thriller, DARK PLACES (Shaye Areheart, $24), Libby comes by her cynicism fair and square. When she was 7, her 15-year-old brother, Ben, took an ax to her mother and two older sisters, and, 24 years later, the girl the tabloids called "the Lone Survivor of the Prairie Massacre" is still seething with anger over everything she lost. Not that family life was all that nurturing in the impoverished Day household, what with a deadbeat dad running the farm into the ground before taking off and a mother so overwhelmed she just gave up. "I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ," Libby confesses. An admitted liar and thief, she's a champion slacker who takes pride in the antisocial behavior that has become her default defense posture: "I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way." Fueling Libby's resentment, the "Baby Day" trust fund that has kept her in cigarettes and out of the work force is about to-dry up. Not knowing what she's letting herself in for, she accepts an invitation to appear at the Kill Club, an underground organization for enthusiasts of infamous criminal cases - only to discover that these ghoulish fans, who believe Ben to be innocent, expect her to help them prove it. Cash in hand, Libby grits her teeth and reopens communication with everyone who figured in the case, including her imprisoned brother and their worthless father. Once she starts examining the massacre from an adult perspective, Libby finds that the profit motive is less of an incentive than her desire to know the truth, which Flynn shrewdly doles out in vivid flashbacks that lead up to the killings. If there's a conscious theme here, it has to do with children who cause "something to happen, something that got bigger than they were" and the chaos that follows when no responsible adults are around. But the term "prairie massacre" might also apply to the destruction of the rural Midwest, captured by the strip clubs, bankrupt malls, abandoned homesteads and other scenes of surpassing ugliness that assault Libby's eyes as she travels the Interstate to her brother's prison, now the major industry in a depressed farm town that once called itself the "Heart of America." Spotting a spiffy new sign with the same old slogan, Libby wryly notes that the locals are still "sticking with the lie." Nobody can teach George Pelecanos anything he doesn't already know about the inherent drama in the father-son dynamic - except, perhaps, a dramatist like Arthur Miller or August Wilson. That thought comes from reading THE WAY HOME (Little, Brown, $24.99), which feels like a crime novel that wants to be something else - a play, if not a movie. There's more character work than action in this sweetly sad narrative about a decent man, Thomas Flynn, who can't figure out how to deal with his teenage son, Chris, when the boy dumps sports and schoolwork to take up marijuana and mischief, becoming so destructive that he pulls a stretch in a juvenile correction facility. After taking his sympathetic portrayal of the father-son standoff as far as it can go, Pelecanos remembers that he needs to work some serious crime into the story. Dutifully, he cooks up a moral challenge for the adult Chris, now so fully reformed that he's laying carpet for his father's company and dating a girl his family actually likes. But the device Pelecanos engineers - the discovery of a gym bag with nearly $50,000 in cash - is too tame to support the violence that follows. In the end, we'd rather be back at the beginning, when father and son were at each other's throats. In the rural North Carolina town where John Hart sets THE LAST CHILD (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), a fatherless boy is a pitiful sight. Everyone feels awful about 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon, whose father fled in despair only two weeks after Johnny's twin sister was kidnapped. The detective on the case feels worse about Johnny's fragile mother, who seems to welcome the abuse of the vile rich man who now supports her. In the absence of any tangible police investigation (Hart is cavalier about forensic procedures), Johnny takes it on himself to canvass the entire county on his bike, conscientiously noting potential pedophiles on tax maps. The story is a good one, and Johnny stands out from the clichéd characters around him. But borrowing from "Huck Finn" doesn't turn Hart into Mark Twain, and his methodical writing style plods along these Southern roads without kicking up anything but dust. Somebody's got to defend all those grown-ups who were once naughty boys and girls, and Maggie Estep and Seth Harwood are perfect for the job. Estep champions outlaws and outcasts like the title character of ALICE FANTASTIC (Akashic, paper, $15.95), a race-track handicapper who lives in Queens with a "trailer trash dog" named Candy and a criminally clumsy boyfriend named Clayton. Harwood has a soft spot for losers like Jack Palms, a one-hit movie star who grabs his chance to get back in the game in JACK WAKES UP (Three Rivers, paper, $13.95) when a San Francisco hustler asks him to play the role of a man-about-town for some visiting gangsters on a drug buy. Neither author seems to give a hoot about plot logistics, and both Alice and Jack allow themselves to be swept up by events. But in these two books, the storytelling has vitality and a spirit of rebellion, giving us hope for the future of all those bad girls with dirty faces and bad boys on bikes. 'I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ,' the embittered narrator of Gillian Flynn's novel confesses.

The sole survivor of a family massacre is pushed into revisiting a past she'd much rather leave alone, in Flynn's scorching follow-up to Sharp Objects (2006). On a January night in 1985, Michelle Day, ten, was strangled, her nine-year-old sister, Debby, killed with an ax, and their mother, Patty, stabbed, hacked and shot to death in the family farmhouse. Weeks after jumping out a window and running off in the Kansas snow, Libby Day, seven, testified that her brother Ben, 15, had killed the family, and he was sent to prison for life amid accusations of sex and Satanism. End of storyexcept that now that the fund well-wishers raised for Libby has run dry, she has to raise some cash pronto, and her family history turns once more into an ATM. A letter from Lyle Wirth promises her a quick $500 to attend the annual convention of the Kill Club, whose members gather to trade theories about unsolved crimes. When self-loathing Libby ("Draw a picture of my soul, it'd be a scribble with fangs") realizes that none of the club members believes her story, she reluctantly agrees to earn some more cash by digging up the leading players: Ben, whose letters she's never opened; their long-departed father Runner, who's as greedy and unscrupulous as Libby; Krissi Cates, the little girl who'd spent the day before the murders accusing Ben of molesting her; and Ben's rich, sleazy girlfriend Diondra Wertzner. Flynn intercuts Libby's venomous detective work with flashbacks to the fatal day 24 years ago so expertly that as they both hurtle toward unspeakable revelations, you won't know which one you're more impatient to finish. Only the climax, which is incredible in both good ways and bad, is a letdown. For most of the wild story's running time, however, every sentence crackles with enough baleful energy to fuel a whole town through the coldest Kansas winter. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Edgar-finalist Flynn's second crime thriller tops her impressive debut, Sharp Objects. When Libby Day's mother and two older sisters were slaughtered in the family's Kansas farmhouse, it was seven-year-old Libby's testimony that sent her 15-year-old brother, Ben, to prison for life. Desperate for cash 24 years later, Libby reluctantly agrees to meet members of the Kill Club, true crime enthusiasts who bicker over famous cases. She's shocked to learn most of them believe Ben is innocent and the real killer is still on the loose. Though initially interested only in making a quick buck hocking family memorabilia, Libby is soon drawn into the club's pseudo-investigation, and begins to question what exactly she saw-or didn't see-the night of the tragedy. Flynn fluidly moves between cynical present-day Libby and the hours leading up to the murders through the eyes of her family members. When the truth emerges, it's so twisted that even the most astute readers won't have predicted it. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Once in a while a book comes along that puts a new spin on an old idea. More than 40 years ago, Truman Capote (with In Cold Blood) took readers inside the Clutter farmhouse in Holcomb, KS, to show them what it was like to walk in a killer's shoes. Flynn (Sharp Objects) takes modern readers back to Kansas to explore the fictional 1985 Day family massacre from the perspective of a survivor as well as the suspects. In order to identify the true killer, an adult Libby Day must come to terms with the traumatic events of her childhood, when her mother and two sisters were slaughtered. Although Flynn sometimes struggles with the large cast of characters she has amassed, each with his or her own set of volatile foibles, and complicates matters by dealing with them in both the present and the past, the tight plotting and engaging characters carry the reader over the few rough patches that appear. For all public libraries.-Nancy McNicol, Hamden P.L., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Libby Day's mother and two younger sisters were viciously slaughtered when she was seven, and her brother, Ben, against whom she testified, has been incarcerated ever since. Twenty-five years later, Libby is still suffering from the aftereffects of the notorious murders. Although it sometimes takes her days to work up the psychic energy to wash her hair, she is not quite the timorous victim the press makes her out to be. When she finds out that the trust fund set up in her name is about to run out of money (the do-gooders have long since moved on to fresh tragedies), she starts gouging money from members of the Kill Club, a group of true-crime fans obsessed with the Day murders. Greedily pricing family memorabilia, wondering how much the Kill Club creeps will pony up for an old birthday card, she learns that none of them believes her brother committed the crime. As she starts investigating, the narrative returns to the day of the murders, intercutting Libby's current-day hunt with the actual events of the day. Despite the fact that the ending is known from the get-go, Flynn (Sharp Objects, 2006) injects these chapters with unbearable tension. And unlovable Libby, mean-spirited and greedy, shows her true colors and her deep courage. A gritty, riveting thriller with a one-of-a-kind, tart-tongued heroine.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2009 Booklist