"Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls." "Since she left town twelve years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half- sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with and eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory."