This book is a slightly disturbing, courtroom drama. Pyper was a lawyer, and he knows his stuff. The character Barth Crane is an entirely unlikeable main character. An anti-hero, a disgusting person. Interesting choice. The really disturbing thing is Pyper's portrayal of crimes so horrendous and unthinkable, and how thinking it becomes an obsession, thinking of his (the lawyer, the student, maybe the teacher) desire to have hurt the girls. Does it make it so? What is the point? Is it a portrayal of the degradation of humanity, of men? And how is it that only now (so late in the novel) is the reader discovering that the abandoned cottage by the lake where surely the girls drowned was Barth's parents? Or should I have figured that out earlier? Is it transformative? Redemptive? It's a thriller that's for sure.And here is Pyper's ending. I need to think about endings. I think the endings are important on which to focus. It might provide clarity. Where am I going?"Take the bag and bury it deep below the sweet garbage of chicken bones, ketchupy fast food bags, an empty bottle of vodka and today's issue of The Star with the front page headline 'Lost Girls' Teacher Goes Missing.' Then I lift myself straight and in the failing light of early winter dusk watch the neighbourhood kids play. Listen to the triumphant 'You're it!' followed by squeals of fresh pursuit and escape. Children oblivious to the fact they are being watched by a stranger on the other side of the playground fence, tagging each other and turning hunted to hunter in regular turns, kicking up the snow as they run so that a shimmering cloud of frozen crystals follows each of the paths they take."Crane is realizing there's more to this story that connects him."Hadn't thought of it, any of it, for a long time. Almost two decades of nothing. And now it's come back out of nowhere. Phoning up in the middle of the night, rising from the water, asking to be held."Crane decides to set fire to anything that will burn in his family's cottage, but endings come up again."Build up the flames until they arch high into the mouth of the flue, then pull a couple of my father's books randomly off the shelves and sit down at the end of the sofa to read. I limit myself to final chapters. Endings pulled apart from the stories they belong to, some tidy and hopeful, others drifting off enigmatically with people staring out of windows over autumn fields or driving away from gravesite visits. Moments vibrating with significance because they're the last things we're told. Decisions can now be made, morals drawn, characters designated as villains or heroes or mere comic relief. But I keep myself to the endings so that I don't have to judge, so that all I'm left with is the final moment, expansive and mysterious...."This is part of something horrifying and sinister, but also interesting. He was an English teacher after all."'One of the things I tried to teach my students is that narrative--what happens to us, the things we do to others--that the whole thing is organic. Of course it was a waste of breath most of the time...'"Endings are very useful and there's more of that later. This is how Dundurn's historical account of the Lady in the Lake ends."It has been said that we only fear that which we do not know. Yet perhaps what we fear most is not the possibility of the unknown, but all of the horrors that we know to be true."This paragraph makes me think of Vancouver Island and how the settlements arose. But it's also true here. There just isn't an ocean to define it."No matter where you start from, north is always so close in this country. Almost any exit taken off the main highway along Lake Ontario after the heavy industries, warehouses and nuclear power stations have passed and in only a couple of hours it's all over you. A place where the ratio of altered to unaltered space gets shifted dramatically in the latter's favour and there is little more ahead than an interminable expanse of humanlessness. Despite patchy settlement and the logical plotting of country lines the north communicates to those traveling through it what it probably always has: there is good reason why most people on this continent hug the ocean, lakeshores or riverbanks, for those are places where someone might have a clue where they are."
Just no. I don’t think I can take anymore of this. Not only has Pyper’s ‘Lost Girls’ lost me completely throughout a good portion of the novel, but it has got me wondering why the hell I ever came to want to pick up this book in the first place. Perhaps it was the deceiving misconception of a good storyline revolving around the murder of two fourteen year old girls and the mysteries that seem to haunt the town of Murdoch and everyone in it. Or a prologue so beautifully written it encouraged vivid visual imagery in my head. Yes, that’s what got me all caught up in the desire to want to find out more about this story. But much to my dismay, it took me a good chunk of 349 pages to get through what I ought to have read probably in the first two hundred pages or so. Only in the 44th chapter out of the 49 did I finally start seeing just how the prologue relates to the story in any way.I must say, Pyper’s endless repetitive descriptions of everything have no doubt imprinted a crystal clear imagery of the characters in my mind like in chapter 5: “His file gave his age as fort-two, but I would have put him a few years older. Not because of the usual evidence of baldness, gray hair or wrinkles (his skin is smooth and his hair, although thin, covers most of his scalp and is more brown than anything else) but from the sticky weariness of his eyes.” (45). If only he wouldn’t spend entire chapters on such lengthy description or focusing merely on either pointless situations of a character driving down a winding road or long monotonous conversations. Perhaps the author really had no idea where this story was going because this Lost Girls has become This Book Just Lost Its Reader. I came for a good mystery law novel, but what do I get in return? A good for nothing blab of description.The protagonist is not someone I would sympathize with either. A cocaine addicted defence lawyer who enjoys visiting strip clubs and would do anything to get his client clear of a guilty verdict, even at the cost of his job or perhaps even defying the law itself. Pyper loses his grip on reality as he emulates the suspense of horror and law mystery involving ghostly encounters, almost as if the author himself was in an unclear state of mind as well. Read it if you must, but I assure you, only if you have an infinite amount of spare time and patience will you find joy in this long endless drivel.
What do You think about Lost Girls (2001)?
Lost Girls by Andrew Pyper, 1999 In a small Northern Ontario town a tragedy, two of the most popular high school girls go missing and eventually presumed dead. Eventually the blame is put on their English teacher which whom the girls had a special relationship with. Thom Tripp a troubled man shadowed by a loss of his own and from which has become mentally unbalanced to the untrained eye of every...one around him. Enter Barth Crane, a lawyer from the big city with some secret habits of his own and a past that is so secret it is one he has kept from even himself. Once this trio comes together a fight between sanity and insanity as well as right and wrong will rage within. As the story unfolds (or tends to not, till the very end) Pyper will keep you pacing, wondering what will happen next to the characters within. Characters with aspirations to infuse hope, pity and doubt inside of you as you follow them down their paths. Along with excellent characters comes extreme detail in the description of the world they will come to live in, it is like poetry. Rating – 3.75 out of 5
—Tina at A COZY GIRL READS
Attorney Bartholomew Crane doesn't belong in the small town of Murdoch. And the town of Murdoch doesn't want him there. Even Crane's client, a teacher accused of killing two girls, his own students, doesn't seem to care if Crane gets him off or not. But Bartholomew Crane has come to Murdoch to try his first murder case -- and he intends to win at all costs. That is, until the case takes an unexpected turn. For as Crane begins to piece together a defense for his client, he finds himself being drawn into a bizarre legend at the heart of the town's history -- a legend that is slowly coming alive before his eyes. Unnerved by visions he sees on Murdoch's dark streets, by the ringing of a telephone down the deserted hallway of his hotel, Crane is beginning to suspect that what is happening to him is happening for a reason. And that the two lost girls of Murdoch may be intricately tied to the town's shameful history...and to a dark episode in his own long-forgotten past. (cover blurb)What the cover blurb doesn't mention is Barth brought some demons to Murdoch with him, including a nasty cocaine habit and terminal ennui.Andrew Pyper gives us a fine view into Barth's disintegrating personality and his increasing obsession with the town legend. Some very nice atmospheric touches -- I could see the trees and feel the cold, smell the dank of Barth's moldering hotel room. A good story, well-written. Recommended.
—Angela
-Warning spoiler alert-Lost Girls is a story set in Murdoch, a small town in Ontario’s lake country. The lead character, Bartholomew Crane is a defence attorney from the Lyle, Gederov & Asscoiates law firm or as Bartholomew says “Lie, Get em off” is sent to Murdoch to defend a suspect in his first murder trial. His client is Thomas Tripp, suspected to be the murderer of two of his students, Ashley Flynn and Krystal McConnell is a man with a loose grip on reality and says he can hear voices in his head. Bartholomew takes the case because there is a lack of evidence and there were no bodies found of the girls. tIn the beginning of the book there is a beautifully described prologue. This prologue describes a girl being dragged to the bottom of a lake and a boy who fails to save her. It is not until the last parts of the book that the reader discovers that the boy is Bartholomew. The way the book ties a loop with the main plot and the mysterious prologue gave me a deeper understanding of Bartholomew. An understanding of how he had watched his cousin disappearing into a lake, having both his parents die in a car crash and how he tried erased his life for twenty years. This understanding transformed the character from a psychopathic, heartless defence attorney to a human. tThrough this discovery of the past he tried to erase he transforms himself. In the beginning of the book when Bartholomew wins a trial and sets a sexual offender free has a thought “…you need not trouble yourself with ‘principles,” however you may understand such prickly term. So too can you stay well off the foggy moors of ‘honour, ‘ ’mercy,’ ’justice,’ whatever.” (17)Showing how he had a bad set of morals. But when the story unfolds he changes his selfish ways to more selfless ways. He figures out that his client was responsible for the two girls’ deaths and tries to turns him in even at the cost of his job. His transformation was so fast leaving me the impression that he was always a good person but just wore a mask to hide from his past.tAside from his transformation Bartholomew encounters a grisly form of the victims in the case. They appear outside his window, inside his hotel room, and even in the back seat of his car. The many ghostly encounters really got me reading on the edge of my seat. tIn this case Bartholomew also encounters the many unique characters. I have found that many readers complain about the author developing too much on the main character and not enough on the others. It is true that Bartholomew is well developed, but it is a first person novel. The author has to put the reader inside the mind of this character and the depth of description used to create this character in the reader’s mind was very effective in doing so. Even so, the many other characters were well developed, although they were mostly clichés they made the book that much more enjoyable. From Krystal McConnell’s overly aggressive father, who in many cases threatened Bartholomew to the awkward teenager Laird the sub characters ,although not as structured as Bartholomew brought the small town to life and added more conflicts and humour to the novel. tI have enjoyed the horror thrills and the beautifully rendered imagery of this novel. Even if the ending of the book was fairly confusing, which I found to be many people’s complaints. I still think Andrew did a good job for his first novel and I would recommend this book to horror or mystery (law) genres. But I would say it is not a hardcore horror or crime novel.
—Patricklai
