We hope you’re enjoying our Capsule Book Club recommendations! This month, we’re diving into an absolute ripper of a true crime novel, Leave The Girls Behind, written by Kiwi author Jacqueline Bublitz – who wrote the epic Before You Knew My Name.
In this new thriller, she takes us through the trauma behind true crime headlines, as the book follows Ruth, whose best friend Beth was murdered as a child by a serial killer. When another girl goes missing from Ruth’s hometown, just like Beth did, Ruth gets dragged back into the investigation as she looks into the theory that the arrested serial killer had a female accomplice who was never found. (Click here for our previous book club installments!)
Capsule x The Warehouse (all items featured in our main photo are also available at The Warehouse!)
I was immediately worried about reading the second novel by Kiwi author Jacqueline Bublitz, because I am an A-grade wuss and the book’s central theme revolves around a serial killer who kidnaps and murders young girls.
(In fact, I actually skipped any of the pages in italics that were told from the kidnapped girls’ perspectives, because I am too much of a snowflake.)
However, that didn’t stop me from absolutely ripping through this book in just two days the week before Christmas – famously extremely busy days – because I simply couldn’t put it down.
Jacqueline Bublitz made a giant name for herself with her debut novel, Before You Knew My Name, which came out in 2022 and won prizes and international acclaim.
Jesus, can this woman write a character!! The protagonist in Leave The Girls Behind is Ruth, who is quite literally haunted by her best friend, Beth, who was murdered when she was young by a serial killer, Ethan Oswald.
Not only is Ruth haunted by Beth, but she’s also haunted by the other dead girls that were never linked officially to Ethan, as well. But when another young girl goes missing in Ruth’s hometown, she dives back into investigating Ethan – even though he has since died in prison – because she always believed he had a female accomplice who was helping him lure away young girls.
Under the guise of setting up a True Crime podcast, Ruth starts collecting the stories from the women who knew Ethan growing up, working out what they knew about the man he really was. But things get murky and dangerous, as Ruth also knows more than she initially lets on and is so emotionally devastated by the disappearance and eventual death of her best friend, that she has clearly lost herself in conspiracy theories before.
Leave the Girls Behind is well-written and well-paced; showing the ripple effects that bad men leave behind, and the women who have to live – and die – with the consequences.
Jacqueline is a hugely empathetic writer – no character’s situation is black and white – and the book details how trauma makes unreliable narrators out of everyone. If you’re a true crime fan, this is a fantastic example of a gripping genre.
But even if you’re like me and mostly too afraid to read about anything to do with children, I suggest you give it a try – there is no schlocky horror details in here, nothing feels exploitative or too gruesome. The book is less possessed by the crimes themselves than it is about how society allows bad men to get away with escalating violence, and the psychology of those who turn away, until they can’t anymore.