Donna Tartt, The Little Friend
Featured Book
Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes is about to have an intense summer. Obsessed with her brother’s unsolved murder (she was an infant when he died), Harriet decides to find his killer. Tartt’s setting is small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, in a big old house filled with Harriet’s maternal aunts and grandmother. As Harriet’s search intensifies, The Little Friend‘s plot darkens and twists. By the end of the novel, it’s hard to decide if Tartt has written a straight up Southern gothic, potboiler mystery, or a demented takeoff on To Kill A Mockingbird. Amazingly, it works as all three.
