NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NOW IN DEVELOPMENT AS AN HBO LIMITED SERIES From the acclaimed author of Gone Girl, “a riveting tale of true horror by a writer who has all the gifts to pull it off” ( Chicago Tribune )   “Sensuous and chilling . . . a propulsive and twisty mystery.”— Entertainment Weekly Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer. Named one of the Best Books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly A Weekend TODAY “Top Summer Read” The New Yorker 's Reviewers' Favorite from 2009 A 2009 Favorite Fiction Pick by The Chicago Tribune "[A] nerve-fraying thriller." — New York Times Book Review “Flynn’s well-paced story deftly shows the fallibility of memory and the lies a child tells herself to get through a trauma.” — The New Yorker “Gillian Flynn coolly demolished the notion that little girls are made of sugar and spice in Sharp Objects , her sensuous and chilling first thriller. In DARK PLACES, her equally sensuous and chilling follow-up, Flynn…has conjured up a whole new crew of feral and troubled young females….[A] propulsive and twisty mystery.” — Entertainment Weekly “Flynn follows her deliciously creepy Sharp Objects with another dark tale . . . The story, alternating between the 1985 murders and the present, has a tense momentum that works beautifully. And when the truth emerges, it’s so macabre not even twisted little Libby Day could see it coming.” — People (4 stars) “Crackles with peevish energy and corrosive wit.” — Dallas Morning News “A riveting tale of true horror by a writer who has all the gifts to pull it off.” — Chicago Tribune "In her first psychological thriller, Sharp Objects, Flynn created a world unsparingly grim and nasty (the heroine carves words into her own flesh) written with irresistibly mordant humor. The sleuth in her equally disturbing and original second novel is Libby Day....It's Flynn's gift that she can make a caustic, self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root for." — New York Magazine “[A] gripping thriller.” — Cosmopolitan "Gillian Flynn is the real deal, a sharp, acerbic, and compelling storyteller with a knack for the macabre." –Stephen King “Another winner!” –Harlan Coben “Gillian Flynn’s writing is compulsively good. I would rather read her than just about any other crime writer.” –Kate Atkinson "Dark Places grips you from the first page and doesn't let go." –Karin Slaughter “With her blistering debut Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn hit the ground running. Dark Places demonstrates that was no fluke.” –Val McDermid “DARK PLACES' Libby Day may seem unpleasant company at first–she's humoring those with morbid curiosities about her family's murders in order to get money out of them–but her steely nature and sharp tongue are compelling. 'I have a meanness inside me,'she says, 'real as an organ.'Yes she does, and by the end of this pitch-black novel, after we've loosened our grip on its cover and started breathing deeply again, we're glad Flynn decided to share it.” –Jessa Crispin, NPR.org “Flynn returns to the front ranks of emerging thriller writers with her aptly titled new novel . . . Those who prefer their literary bones with a little bloody meat will be riveted.” — Portland Oregonian “Gillian Flynn may turn out to be a more gothic John Irving for the 21st century, a writer who uses both a surgeon's scalpel and a set of rusty harrow discs to rip the pretty face off middle America.” — San Jose Mercury News “The world of this novel is all underside, all hard flinch, and Flynn’s razor-sharp prose intensifies this effect as she knuckles in on every sentence. . . . The slick plotting in DARK PLACES will gratify the lover of a good thriller–but so, too, will Flynn’s prose, which is ferocious and unrelenting and pure pleasure from word one.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer “Gillian Flynn’s second novel, DARK PLACES , proves that her first – Sharp Objects – was no fluke. . . . tough, surprising crime fiction that dips its toes in the deeper waters of literary fiction.” — Chicago Sun-Times "Flynn fully inhabits Libby—a damaged woman whose world has resided entirely in her own head for the majority of her life and who is prone to dark metaphors: 'Dr