Frederick Busch has built a reputation as a master storyteller, a magician with words, and a writer who deserves to be a household name. In his new novel, Girls, he once again treats readers to the "ice-clear, dagger-sharp" (Seattle Times) writing he's become known for and a story that's deeply affecting, terrifying, and tragic. Jack is a security officer at an upstate New York college. When 14-year-old Janice Tanner vanishes from a neighboring town, he reluctantly becomes involved in the search as a favor to a friend of the girl's parents. A suicidal young woman, a teenage runaway, and two more missing girls make it impossible for Jack to drive resurfacing memories of his own daughter's death from his mind. In the course of the investigation, as he comes to confront Janice's murderer, Jack comes to realize just how dangerous it is to be a girl: "I wondered if girls had been kidnapped, murdered, preyed upon for years. Maybe it was the times, and therefore everything human and otherwise from when we began might not be at fault." Girls is a novel that is both a thriller and a stylistic wonder, and, like its protagonist, is tender and tough at the same time.

Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp, the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.