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Summary and Reviews of What Lies in the Woods by Kate Marshall

What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

What Lies in the Woods

A Novel

by Kate Alice Marshall
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Jan 17, 2023, 336 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jan 2024, 336 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Kate Alice Marshall's What Lies in the Woods is a thrilling novel about friendship, secrets, betrayal, and lies - and having the courage to face the past.

Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls' testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.

And they were liars.

For decades, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods―no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.

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Reviews

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Reading the novel feels a bit like riding a roller coaster: enjoying a slow build-up followed by a breakneck rush to the conclusion. The book eventually becomes absolutely unputdownable, as the revelations come fast and furious near the novel's conclusion. Truly engrossing mysteries are hard to find, and when I stumble across one, I treasure it. What Lies in the Woods is one of the most absorbing entries in the genre I've encountered...continued

Full Review (576 words)

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(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).

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Beyond the Book



A Crowd-Sourced Tool for Solving Crime

In Kate Alice Marshall's murder mystery What Lies in the Woods, characters use a resource called the DoeNetwork to identify a corpse.

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), a database funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, about 600,000 people go missing in the United States each year. Most are found quickly, alive and well, but "tens of thousands remain missing for more than one year." It's also estimated that 4,400 unidentified bodies are found annually, with about a quarter of those remaining unknown after a year. As of 2022, more than 13,000 unidentified body cases remain open in the United States.

DoeNetwork Logo The DoeNetwork is one of several resources people can use to help identify ...

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Read-Alikes

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