The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “With more twists than a bag of pretzels, this compelling family saga may make you question what you think you know about your own relatives.”—Cosmopolitan 

“Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.”
 
After her mother's suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas. Lane knew little of her mother's mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran…fast and far away.
 
Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or something worse? Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind. Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.
 
As it weaves between Lane’s first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101906682
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	247,833
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

AMY ENGEL is the author of the young adult series The Book of Ivy. A former criminal defense attorney, she lives in Missouri with her family. This is her first novel for adults.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

 The first time I saw Roanoke was in a dream. I knew little of it beyond its name and the fact it was in Kansas, a place I had never been. My mother only ever mentioned it when she’d had too much wine, her breath turned sweet and her words slow and syrupy like molasses. So my subconscious filled in the rest. In my dream it stood tall and stately, tucked among a forest of spring-green trees. Its red-brick facade was broken up by black shutters, white trim, delicate wrought-iron balconies. A little girl’s fantasy of a princess castle.

When I woke, I started to tell my mother about it. Talking through a mouthful of stale Cheerios drowned in just-this-side-of-sour milk. I got only as far as the name, Roanoke, before she stopped me. “It was nothing like that,” she said, voice flat. She was sitting on the wide windowsill, knees drawn up into her cotton nightgown, smoke from her cigarette gathered around her like a shroud. Her ragged toenails dug into the wooden window frame.

“You didn’t even let me tell you,” I whined.

“Did you wake up screaming?”

A dribble of milk ran down my chin. “Huh?”

She turned and glanced at me then, her skin pale, eyes red-rimmed.The bones of her face looked sharp enough to cut. “Was it a nightmare?”

I shook my head, confused and a little scared. “No.”She looked back out the window. “Then it was nothing like that.”

Editorial Reviews

A gripping tale about the power and corrosiveness within families weighed down by the past…storytelling at its finest.”
– The Associated Press

“With more twists than a bag of pretzels, this compelling family saga may make you question what you think you know about your own relatives.”
– Cosmopolitan 

"A page-turning thriller that will allow you to escape into another world…filled with family secrets and a legacy of death and disappearance for the infamous “Roanoke Girls” — a privileged Kansas matriarchy with more than its fair share of tragic drama.” 
– Bustle

"A crime must-read to devour…The Roanoke Girls has nothing to do with Virginia but everything to do with missing girls, as the females in the Roanoke family, who live in a tiny town in rural Kansas not worth naming, are rich, beautiful, and generally short-lived…The farmhouse, which is 'equal parts horrifying and mesmerizing,' is a perfect setting for a gothic mystery full of small-town secrets, lies, and guilt.” 
– Literary Hub

“[This] engrossing novel by Engel, a former criminal defense attorney, offers everything a reader could hope for — multidimensional characters, a page-turning plot and surprises that continue to unfurl throughout the story…Highly recommended!”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The Roanoke Girls, the new suspense novel by Amy Engel, is one of those captivating stories which make you ask for more from this talented author…an exciting read from a talented new voice in adult suspense.”
– Mystery Tribune

"Engel drops a wicked twist in the first 35 pages—in the middle of a paragraph on the middle of the page—and lets it sit like a coiled snake...from that point on, The Roanoke Girls becomes a thrilling mystery and a satisfyingly gothic portrait of Middle America...a dark fable of trauma and acceptance about damaged people accepting their crooked parts and using them to move forward." 
– Bookpage

“Engel hits a homerun with this “gothic suspense novel” that tells the story of the Roanoke family, a prominent and very private Kansas family…a rollercoaster ride through a dark family history and the one devastating family secret.”  
– Pulse Magazine

"Gripping…[a] gothic page-turner…with revelations readers won’t soon forget.”
– Publishers Weekly

“In her first foray into adult fiction, [Engel] creates a memorable cast of characters and a twisting, tangled plot that attracts readers from the first page…[an] atmospheric and unsettling tale of the secrets and bonds of family, set against the backdrop of small-town Kansas.”
— Library Journal

“A provocative thriller.”
— Telegraph UK

"A debt to Daphne du Maurier is evident throughout this remarkably assured adult debut...you are also reminded of the theatrical domestic sagas of Tennessee Williams."
– Sunday Times

"An emotionally captivating story."
– Booklist

"I was immediately drawn into The Roanoke Girls, a haunting and riveting look at one family's tangled legacy. You won't stop reading until you've unraveled the darkest of Roanoke's shocking secrets."
– Laura McHugh, award-winning author of The Weight of Blood

“This is a poised and haunting novel, whose enchanting prose belies its dark and intense subject matter. An evocative modern take on Southern Gothic, with a compelling twist which will remain with you long after the book’s last sentence.”
– L.S. Hilton, New York Times bestselling author of Maestra
 
“An emotionally compelling page turner, The Roanoke Girls takes you inside the dark world of a twisted family and one woman's fight to break free from the chains of her own history. This is family intrigue at its very best!”
– Wendy Walker, author of All Is Not Forgotten

From the Publisher

01/09/2017
YA author Engel (The Book of Ivy) makes her adult debut with a gripping if creepy thriller set on the Kansas prairie. Lane Roanoke fervently hoped she had seen the last of Roanoke, the family homestead, when she fled Kansas for Los Angeles as a desperate 16-year-old, but now a decade later the disappearance of her cousin Allegra, the only kin to whom she feels a connection, compels her to return against her better judgment. Indeed, with local law enforcement stymied, it seems that the only hope of solving the mystery lies with Lane and whatever clues she can dredge up from memories of the traumatic summer the two cousins shared as teens. Skipping lightly between past and present, including Lane’s efforts to finally come to terms with the two most influential men in her life—dangerously seductive family patriarch Yates and roguish Cooper Sullivan, her never-forgotten first love—this gothic page-turner speeds inexorably toward the kinds of devastating revelations readers won’t soon forget. Agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2016
When 15-year-old Lane Roanoke's mother commits suicide, Lane returns to the family's eponymous home in rural Kansas—the place her mother had been so desperate to escape years before. At first, life at Roanoke seems comfortable. Lane and her cousin Allegra have the run of the house and the undivided attention of their grandfather Yates. But over the course of a summer, Lane begins to uncover the same dark family secrets that drove her mother away. Herself fleeing from Roanoke eleven years later, Lane again returns to try to solve the mystery of Allegra's disappearance—and to bring the ugly past to light. Engel (The Book of Ivy) has had success with several YA novels. In her first foray into adult fiction, she creates a memorable cast of characters and a twisting, tangled plot that attracts readers from the first page. VERDICT This atmospheric and unsettling tale of the secrets and bonds of family, set against the backdrop of small-town Kansas, is recommended for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides and Lory Roy's Bent Road. [See Prepub Alert, 9/26/16.]—Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins

Library Journal

2016-11-22
Whole lotta dead girls in this rural Kansas family.Lane Roanoke returns to the farm where she grew up after her grandfather calls to say her cousin Allegra is missing. The two were raised by their grandparents because their mothers were either dead or "gone," as are all their aunts, great-aunts, and a cousin. "Roanoke girls never last long around here," explains Allegra when Lane arrives at age 15, shortly after her mother's suicide. "In the end, we either run or we die." You won't be left wondering what the source of the problem is. As Lane says to her "fiercely handsome" grandfather soon after her return, "Well, you'd be the one to know…. You were screwing her." Since Allegra had the habit of carving words into the furniture and woodwork, Lane is certain she will find a clue somewhere if she looks hard enough. And she does! RUN LANE is carved into the abandoned vanity in Allegra's bedroom! Instead of taking that advice, she spends the rest of the book hanging around the incest ranch with her horrific grandparents, meeting up with her old running buddies in town, and ripping off her pants here and there for an old flame. Lane eventually finds the key to Allegra's fate in a ludicrous way, at which point a back story so nefarious it's almost funny comes spilling out. In her acknowledgments, the author thanks her grandparents for showing her the joys of small-town life, but, unfortunately, the book traffics in the most vicious stereotypes and rumors about the people who live it. That includes the old boyfriend she hooks up with, an auto mechanic brutally abused by his auto mechanic father; the dumb but loyal local cop; and, most problematically, Lane herself. She's beautiful, trashy, and full of self-loathing, which she works hard to deserve but which fails to make her an interesting character. Sordid, unrealistic, and unredeemed.

Kirkus Reviews