Grace Murphy doesn’t seem like the type of woman who’d have a man cable-tied to a chair, slowly dying in her house. She keeps to herself and goes through life working as a barista, and caring for her sister, showing her the love they never had as children . . .

Police officer Jerry Hughes knows about Grace’s brutal and troubled childhood; his own life was deeply affected by it.

Jerry still checks in on the sisters from time to time. But recently he’s been distracted by work. Men are going missing—and they seem to have nothing in common except for an uncanny physical resemblance to someone from Grace Murphy’s dark past . . .

IN A NUTSHELL
‘The Good Girl’ was an original, brutal, surprising, twisty and, in its way deeply truthful story about the damage done to and by two abused and neglected sisters. Hard-hitting from the first page, it was compelling without being exploitative. It was a book about pain, mental illness and guilt. Almost everyone in this book fails someone. The consequences are bloody and permanent. It’s a story where the people live in the gap between what we tell ourselves and what’s really going on. 

I loved the honesty of Michelle Dunne’s first book While Nobody is Watching, a realistic thriller that got in the head of Lindsey Ryan, an ex-soldier who now works with troubled kids as she copes with PTSD. Her second book, The Invisible, stayed with Lindsey, kept the honesty but cranked up the tension. The first ten per cent of the book banged me, face-first, into a wall of unpleasant reality and promised that there’d be much worse to come. It was a well-crafted, edge-of-the-seat thriller that engaged unblinkingly with the ugly realities of modern slavery.

‘The Good Girl’ breaks new ground. It’s a standalone novel about Grace Murphy, a serial killer who thinks she’s killing the same man again and again. 

The first chapter is brutal. In it, Grace is fierce and merciless. She has a man tied to a chair, she is abusing him, ignoring his pleas for mercy and waiting for him to die. It was a disturbing chapter to read. Full of hate and violence. Impossible to look away from. I was repelled but I was also intrigued. I had questions I needed to know the answers to. What would make Grace behave like that? How could the people around her not notice? What had the man done to her?

As I read on, I found the answers to all of those questions but none of them were what I expected. To many of the characters in the book, Grace is the Good Girl of the title, She’s a young woman who has survived a horrendous childhood, holds down a job running a café, is kind to her customers and looks after her younger sister. One local police officer, who has known her since she was a child, admires her strength and resilience.

And yet she has a man tied up in her house who she is killing slowly. 

For the first half of the book, things keep getting more and more complicated and with each complication, the story becomes sadder and grimmer. What makes it so hard-hitting is that everything feels not just plausible but true.

It’s not just that bad things happened to Grace and her sister. It’s not even that they both still bear the scars of what happened to them. It’s that people around KNEW what was happening. Knew it for a long time. And did very little. Grace has been failed by everyone around her.

By the time I reached the last 20% of the book, I thought I knew Grace’s story and the situation she was in but I had no idea how things would be resolved. I read deep into the night. I had to know what would happen.

What I learned was that I hadn’t fully understood Grace or her situation. The resolution was as complex and open to interpretation as the people involved in the story. 

This was a disturbing but deeply satisfying read. It worked as a compelling, if violent, thriller, For me, it was the violence that was disturbing but the plausible picture the story drew of how abuse happens and continues to happen in plain sight of people who should be ending it and how deep the scars it leaves behind are.