Bartholomew Crane's first homicide trial ought to be an easy win for the young, arrogant Toronto attorney. The bodies of two missing teenagers--the Lost Girls--have never been found, and there's slight forensic evidence to tie the chief suspect, a high school English teacher, to their disappearance. Dispatched to the Canadian north woods to defend Thomas Tripp against a murder charge, Crane packs his omnipresent flask of cocaine and begins preparing to demolish the Crown's flimsy, highly circumstantial case. Crane doesn't care whether Tripp is guilty; his only job is to get him off. But Crane's client won't cooperate in his own defense, and the citizens of the small, depressed town are clamoring for his conviction.

Within days, Crane's waking and sleeping hours are haunted by odd occurrences: the disturbing apparitions of a madwoman who drowned in the same mist-shrouded lake where Tripp is assumed to have disposed of his victims; the incessant ringing of a telephone down the empty hallway of his motel; the bizarre tale of a 100-year-old murder told by an elderly woman whose own daughter was claimed by the legendary Lady of Lake St. Christopher. In short order, the facts and surmises of the case become intertwined with Crane's visions and nightmares, and what had seemed like a straightforward, easily defended case based on wrongful accusation becomes a morality play in which the protagonist himself must answer for events that occurred 20 years ago.

A brooding, moody novel as dark as its setting, Lost Girls is less a courtroom drama than a ghost story hinged on a thin plot. Crane is not a particularly likable or sympathetic character, and Pyper's attempts at creating atmosphere favor the "It was a dark and stormy night" school of genre writing. But fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul will find this a chilly enough read to occupy just that kind of evening. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly
Toronto resident Pyper's spell-binding debut succeeds on so many levels--as a mystery, a legal thriller, a literary character study--that's it's obvious why it was a #1 bestseller last year in Canada. Breathing new life into a modern cliche, the lawyer in need of redemption, the narrator and proudly unlikable main character is do-anything-to-win Toronto attorney Bartholomew Crane, who is assigned the "lost girls" case by his firm, Lyle, Gederov (colloquially known as "Lie, Get 'Em Off"). Two schoolgirls are missing and presumed drowned in Lake St. Christopher, in the outback of Murdoch, Ontario. The man accused of their murder is one of the girls' teachers, Thomas Tripp. Crane quickly discovers that Tripp is uncooperative and seemingly insane, blaming the girls' disappearance on the legendary ghost of a woman who drowned 50 years ago in the lake. Since there's little more than circumstantial evidence against Tripp, Crane is initially confident that he can get the man off. But that confidence dissolves as he immerses himself in the case and the history of the region. Pyper uses Crane's almost vicious self-awareness to chart the crumbling of his self-image as he binges on cocaine, goes stir-crazy in the rural town, and confronts a long-repressed tragedy from his past that bears on the case. As Crane's devastating history unfolds, it's revealed how he became such a shark; as he accepts the truth about himself and his desperate need to solve the mystery behind the ghost story, his fundamental character is illuminated-gradually, with the same restrained suspense that makes Pyper's ingeniously tight plotline so compulsively appealing. BOMC/QPB featured alternate. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In a small Canadian town, two 14-year-old girls are missing and presumed drowned. Toronto attorney Bartholomew Crane arrives to defend Thom Tripp, the girls' English teacher, who is accused of first-degree murder. At first the egocentric, caustic Crane doesn't care about the truthDhe just wants to get the job done. The more he probes, however, the more he comes across the legend of the Lady in the Lake, who drags her victims down to the watery depths. Disturbing visions and voices unnerve him. Once he faces his own grief-stricken past, he emerges as a likable human being. Debut novelist and lawyer Pyper writes his murder mystery in a Tom Wolfe style of luxuriant hyperbole, portraying outrageous yet believable characters. His fast-paced present tense is well suited to the antic, first-person narrative of the coke-addicted Crane. Patrons may have to wrest a copy from librarians dipping into this Canadian best seller during lunch hour.-DMolly Gorman, San Marino, CA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review's Summer Reading issue, June 4
"...a good MYSTERY read for summer; praised as an "elegant debut novel ... takes a brilliant turn into psychological terror."

From AudioFile
Written by a Canadian author and read by a Canadian actor, this psychological thriller is about a seemingly untrustworthy lawyer sent to the sticks by his firm to defend a teacher accused of murdering two teenage girls--though their bodies have never been found. Did he kill them, or were they vanquished by the spirit of a woman dead more than fifty years? By the time the listener learns the answer, at least one other mystery is solved and the despicable lawyer has redeemed himself. This story is deftly told by James Daniels. His accent, though distracting at first, makes the lawyer's character totally believable. His delivery is prompt and crisp, and his voice is almost inviting. This is the second Canadian novel to be sampled recently by Brilliance--their editors should be complimented for offering them. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
In the desolate northern Ontario town of Murdoch, two high-school girls are seen getting into the car of their English teacher, Thomas Tripp. The girls are never seen again, alive or dead. In a highly unusual legal maneuver, Tripp is charged with the girls' murders, despite the lack of bodies or concrete physical evidence. Tripp's indictment seems based largely on his solitary divorced life, his deadpan demeanor, and his teens-in-their-undies decorating scheme. The case quickly becomes a nightmare for Bartholomew Crane, a thirtyish Toronto barrister with a coke habit, a giant ego, and a bitterly cynical vision of the world. Crane's attempts to gather background information are met with hostility, indifference, or cryptic references to a ghost who inhabits the woods where the girls are thought to be buried. And the hotel where Crane has set up shop is a decrepit relic with a phantom phone that rings all through the night, but only Crane can hear it. This extraordinarily mature and fully realized first novel brilliantly grafts familiar bits and pieces into a stunning and original whole: courtroom scenes from a half-dozen best-sellers; the creepy ambience of Dean Koontz filtered through Rod Serling's Twilight Zone; and even a bit of the unwelcome-outsider paranoia we recall from the Spencer Tracy classic Bad Day at Black Rock. Most memorable, though, is the character of narrator Crane, who undergoes one of the most complete yet credible moral metamorphoses in recent fiction. A debut to remember and a real treat for crime-fiction fans. Wes Lukowsky

Review
"Brilliant."
? The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliantly written ... rich in texture and rife with atmosphere that's beautifully described.... A terrifying thriller."
? New York Post

"As compelling a novel as I've read this year."
? The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"An unusual and compelling novel ... with great skill, Pyper brings his material together to a genuinely surprising climax."
? Chicago Tribune

"Dazzling ... compulsively readable ... I don't know what's more seductive about Lost Girls, author Andrew Pyper's scabrously witty, darkly musical language or the psychological pull of his plot."
? The Boston Globe

Book Description
Bartholomew Christian Crane is a criminal defense attorney who wins. Thirty-three, silver-tongued, and driven by a moral code that preaches, "There are no such things as lies, only misperceptions," Barth is ripe for the first murder trial of his career. Two fourteen-year-old girls have gone missing and are presumed dead in a depressed northern Ontario town. The girls' teacher - now Barth's client - is the prime suspect. Booking himself into the seedy Empire Hotel, Barth begins work on a trial that quickly slides into a nightmarish tableau of psychological terror, where the distinction between dream and reality is as fine as the lines of coke he relies on for inspiration. He feels an uneasy connection to the victims, who presumably lie in the bottom of the lake just outside town . . . the same lake that is believed to be haunted.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Courtroom Thrills, Supernatural Chills
A major bestseller in Canada, Andrew Pyper's Lost Girls is a strikingly original first novel that crosses genre boundaries with ease and assurance. It starts out as a conventional legal thriller with all the standard trappings -- a sensational murder case, a sleazy, anything-for-a-dollar defense attorney -- and then evolves in unexpected directions. Somewhere along the line, Lost Girls leaves Scott Turow country behind to become both a deeply unsettling supernatural thriller and a meditation on guilt, fate, alienation, and the power of repressed memories.

The narrator -- and sleazy lawyer at the heart of the novel -- is Bartholomew ("Call me Barth") Crane, a junior member of the firm of Lyle, Gederoff, and Associate, generally known to the legal community as "Lie and Get 'em Off." When we first encounter Barth, he is wrapping up his latest triumph by convincing the girlfriend of an accused rapist to provide her boyfriend with a false alibi. After neatly engineering a last minute acquittal, Barth returns to his office to find his latest assignment awaiting him: a murder trial involving two teenaged girls who have been missing for weeks and are now presumed dead, murdered by their high-school English teacher.

The "Lost Girls" case is the stuff of tabloid headlines, and the trial the sort that can make -- or break -- a legal career in a single stroke. To Barth and his associates, it looks too good to be true. The Crown's case against accused teacher Thomas Tripp is weak and unconvincing. There are, after all, no bodies and therefore no conclusive proof that the murders have occurred. The majority of the case is founded on supposition, circumstantial evidence, and ambiguous forensic details. Reasonably sure of a quick, decisive victory, Barth heads for the remote Northern Ontario town of Murdoch, bringing his primary source of inspiration -- a large stash of high-grade cocaine -- with him.

Once in Murdoch, the tone of the narrative abruptly darkens, and reality itself grows fluid and uncertain. The mood of the town is restless, edgy, and violent. Barth's client seems utterly disconnected from events and is unable -- or unwilling -- to cooperate in his own defense. Tripp claims to hear voices in his head and appears to believe that the power behind the girls' disappearance is a long-dead woman known, in local legends, as the Lady in the Lake.

The nameless Lady was a European refugee who came to Murdoch with her two daughters in the aftermath of World War II. An odd, alien presence, she was eventually separated from her children, incarcerated in a local asylum, and subjected to a mandatory hysterectomy. In time, she escaped from the asylum and returned to Murdoch, where her strange ways and blatant sexuality inflamed the populace, who came together in an impromptu lynch mob and chased her into the icy waters of nearby Lake Saint Christopher, where she drowned. Legends concerning the Lady and her posthumous activities have persisted for nearly 50 years, and more than one resident believes she is the animating force behind the town's latest tragedy. Before too long, Crane comes to believe that, too.

The bulk of Lost Girls recounts the haunting -- and the incremental disintegration -- of Bartholomew Crane. Ensconced in the honeymoon suite of the town's only hotel, Barth endures recurring nightmares, bizarre apparitions, and otherworldly encounters. The Lady and her teenaged victims appear before him at odd moments. An endlessly ringing telephone disrupts his sleep, and disembodied voices whisper vague, unspecified accusations in his ear. Barth, typically, responds to these assaults by increasing his already prodigious cocaine and alcohol intake. As reality fractures under the combination of internal and external pressures, Barth comes to understand two things: that the Lady in the Lake is real and that he himself is connected to her ongoing drama through a traumatic, long-buried incident from his own past.

Barth Crane is a complex, caustic, memorably nasty creation, and his gradual confrontation with his own hidden history occurs against a haunted, surreal backdrop that Pyper evokes with impressive, almost effortless authority. By any standards, Lost Girls is a remarkable first novel, one of those rare debuts in which style, setting, character, and theme come seamlessly together, creating an enthralling -- and convincing -- narrative whole. Andrew Pyper, a young Toronto attorney with talent to burn, has made an indelible impression his first time out, and I hope his book receives the same degree of success and acclaim in America that it recently received in his native country. Lost Girls is the real thing, and I urge you to give it a try.

--Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Attorney Bartholomew Christian Crane doesn't belong in the town of Murdoch. And Murdoch, a small city by the shores of Lake St. Christopher, doesn't want him there. Even Crane's client, a teacher accused of murdering two young girls, his own students, doesn't seem to care if Crane gets him off or not. But Crane loves nothing better than turning guilt into innocence, lies into truth, and winning at all costs. His boss's motto for defending a client: Don't just deny, blame someone else. Now Crane will try to do just that - until the case takes an unexpected turn, pulling Crane from the mooring of his big-city smugness and shattering the icy cocoon around his heart." "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 beleaguered streets, by a woman he meets in a seedy strip club, by the ringing of a telephone down the deserted hallway of his run-down motel, 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 connected to the town's shameful history, and to a dark espisode in his own long-forgotten past."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Book Review - Summer Reading issue June 4, 2000 issue)

.......a good Mystery read for summer; praised as an elegant debut novel ... takes a brilliant turn into psychological terror.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

A #1 bestseller in Canada, this first novel takes readers into dangerous territory as an attorney finds himself drawn into a bizarre legend connected to two lost girls and a town's shameful history. "Off to a roaring start, with good courtroom scenes and a rich portrayal of rural Canadian life." "The flawed, but ultimately appealing, protagonist consumes enough cocaine to give this reader a contact high."

Publishers Weekly

Toronto resident Pyper's spell-binding debut succeeds on so many levels--as a mystery, a legal thriller, a literary character study--that's it's obvious why it was a #1 bestseller last year in Canada. Breathing new life into a modern cliche, the lawyer in need of redemption, the narrator and proudly unlikable main character is do-anything-to-win Toronto attorney Bartholomew Crane, who is assigned the "lost girls" case by his firm, Lyle, Gederov (colloquially known as "Lie, Get 'Em Off"). Two schoolgirls are missing and presumed drowned in Lake St. Christopher, in the outback of Murdoch, Ontario. The man accused of their murder is one of the girls' teachers, Thomas Tripp. Crane quickly discovers that Tripp is uncooperative and seemingly insane, blaming the girls' disappearance on the legendary ghost of a woman who drowned 50 years ago in the lake. Since there's little more than circumstantial evidence against Tripp, Crane is initially confident that he can get the man off. But that confidence dissolves as he immerses himself in the case and the history of the region. Pyper uses Crane's almost vicious self-awareness to chart the crumbling of his self-image as he binges on cocaine, goes stir-crazy in the rural town, and confronts a long-repressed tragedy from his past that bears on the case. As Crane's devastating history unfolds, it's revealed how he became such a shark; as he accepts the truth about himself and his desperate need to solve the mystery behind the ghost story, his fundamental character is illuminated-gradually, with the same restrained suspense that makes Pyper's ingeniously tight plotline so compulsively appealing. BOMC/QPB featured alternate. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

In a small Canadian town, two 14-year-old girls are missing and presumed drowned. Toronto attorney Bartholomew Crane arrives to defend Thom Tripp, the girls' English teacher, who is accused of first-degree murder. At first the egocentric, caustic Crane doesn't care about the truth--he just wants to get the job done. The more he probes, however, the more he comes across the legend of the Lady in the Lake, who drags her victims down to the watery depths. Disturbing visions and voices unnerve him. Once he faces his own grief-stricken past, he emerges as a likable human being. Debut novelist and lawyer Pyper writes his murder mystery in a Tom Wolfe style of luxuriant hyperbole, portraying outrageous yet believable characters. His fast-paced present tense is well suited to the antic, first-person narrative of the coke-addicted Crane. Patrons may have to wrest a copy from librarians dipping into this Canadian best seller during lunch hour. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/00.]--Molly Gorman, San Marino, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

AudioFile - AudioFile Review

Written by a Canadian author and read by a Canadian actor, this psychological thriller is about a seemingly untrustworthy lawyer sent to the sticks by his firm to defend a teacher accused of murdering two teenage girls--though their bodies have never been found. Did he kill them, or were they vanquished by the spirit of a woman dead more than fifty years? By the time the listener learns the answer, at least one other mystery is solved and the despicable lawyer has redeemed himself. This story is deftly told by James Daniels. His accent, though distracting at first, makes the lawyer's character totally believable. His delivery is prompt and crisp, and his voice is almost inviting. This is the second Canadian novel to be sampled recently by Brilliance--their editors should be complimented for offering them. A.L.H. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine