The Quarry Girls: Small-Town Secrets with Sharp Teeth
There are some books you read curled up under a cosy blanket, and there are others you read while double-checking the back door is locked. The Quarry Girls by Jess Lourey is firmly in the latter camp. Set in a 1970s Midwestern town that worships conformity almost as much as it ignores its girls, this crime thriller feels unsettlingly timely in a world still arguing about whose voices are believed.
We follow a group of teenage girls navigating the claustrophobia of small-town life, where everyone knows your business yet somehow nobody knows anything when girls start disappearing. Lourey gives us just enough plot to keep the pages whipping by—missing girls, a network of sinister tunnels, respectable men with decidedly unrespectable secrets—without tipping into spoiler territory. It’s a psychological thriller that leans more on dread and character than on jump scares, which suits me perfectly; I’d rather be quietly unnerved than outright traumatised before bed.
What really lingers is how The Quarry Girls captures everyday misogyny. The town’s sexism is so normalised that the girls almost don’t notice it at first: the minimised fears, the off-hand comments, the sense that their bodies are public property. Reading this as a woman in 2026 feels depressingly current. Between #MeToo, true-crime podcasts, and our cultural obsession with “missing white woman syndrome,” this novel prods at how society decides which victims matter, and which predators are “too successful” to question.
“In our neighbourhood, the problem wasn’t the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.”
Lourey’s sense of place is razor-sharp. The quarry itself, with its yawning pits and echoing tunnels, becomes a metaphor for everything unsaid: the secrets families bury, the deals communities make to keep their shiny reputations intact. It’s atmospheric without being purple; you can almost smell the damp concrete and feel the weight of that heavy Midwestern summer air pressing against your skin. For fans of small-town crime fiction and dark coming-of-age stories, this is deliciously moody stuff.
On a personal note, I found myself weirdly protective of the girls. They’re messy, flawed, sometimes mean, always painfully human. Lourey doesn’t romanticise teenage girlhood; she honours its intensity—the fierce friendships, shifting loyalties, and that dawning, horrifying awareness that the adults in charge may not be nearly as competent as advertised. I did wish a couple of side characters had a touch more depth, but in a story this tense, the focus on core relationships keeps the narrative lean and propulsive.
If you enjoy crime novels with a feminist backbone, The Quarry Girls absolutely earns its place on your bookshelf. It’s the kind of dark, twisty thriller that keeps you turning pages late into the night and then leaves you thinking about institutional silence, gendered power, and the cost of looking the other way. Just maybe don’t read it alone in a quiet house. Or, if you do, at least draw the curtains and keep the lights on. You’ve been warned.
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