Sharp Objects

Sharp Objects is a novel by the American writer Gillian Flynn, published in 2006 and her debut. It is a psychological thriller set in a small town in Missouri, and it was adapted into a television series in 2018.

Camille Preaker is a reporter on a small newspaper who has just come out of a psychiatric hospital. Her first assignment sends her back to Wind Gap, the town where she grew up, to cover the murders of two girls.

Staying in her old home means living again with her mother, Adora, who rules the house, and with her thirteen-year-old half-sister, Amma, a girl who is charming to adults and dangerous to those her own age. Camille has spent her adult life not thinking about her childhood, and the town makes that impossible to keep up.

Flynn tells the story from Camille's point of view, so the reader learns what has happened to her only as she can bear to look at it, and the murders keep forcing the town's older history back to the surface. The book is a standalone novel.