The Wicked Girls, which won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original; The Killer Next Door, which won a Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel; The Darkest Secret; and The Poison Garden. Her novels have been short-listed for numerous crime writing awards and been optioned for the screen. She lives in south London.
Marwood applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Island of Lost Girls, and reported the following:
This is page 69 of The Island of Lost Girls:Visit Alex Marwood's website.Chapter 9In many ways, this scene is completely isolated from the rest of the novel. The characters, although we have met them briefly in passing, are not primary characters, and this is one of a very small number of scenes that aren’t set on the fictional island of La Castellana, a dot in the Mediterranean that has undergone a swift transformation from poverty-stricken feudal outpost to billionaires’ playground with the construction of a superyacht marina and the introduction of favourable banking laws.
She waits with the lights off, reading on her phone in the darkness on her daughter’s bed. But the long wait, and her long day at work, get the better of her and she falls asleep. And she’s woken by the overhead light coming on, and her daughter’s slurred cursing.
She sits up. Gemma stands in the doorway of her bedroom, glaring, make-up awry, dressed like a whore.
‘Fuck,’ Gemma says.
The alarm clock tells that her it’s three a.m. Gemma’s dress barely covers her crotch, and it looks as if it’s glued to her skin. It actually is, in places, for it’s damp with sweat, and sticky. She has scraped her curls up into a topknot, looks a bit like a pineapple. She looks more forty than sixteen. The skin beneath her foundation is pale, and greenish.
Ridiculous, thinks Robin. You look ridiculous.
She’s wearing diamond earrings, and smells of Diorissima.
Christ, thinks Robin, where’s she getting the money for this stuff? And where’s she hiding it? I’ve not seen anything like this dress in the laundry. Diamonds? At her age? Maybe they’re fake and I just don’t have the eye. Please, please let them be a guilt gift from her stupid dad. And those ankle-breakers she’s wobbling on have scarlet soles, and we all know what that means.
And yet… the chapter that this scene opens is pivotal for Robin, and for Gemma, for it is the last time they will see each other, and it explores themes that run through the whole: how much we turn our eyes away from the dangers that face girls as they progress through adolescence, how communication collapses within families when bad things happen, the darkness that always accompanies glamour. In the aftermath of a miserable divorce, her parents still at loggerheads and using her as ammunition, Gemma’s yearning for positive attention has rendered her a sitting duck for groomers. And Robin, distracted by her own unhappiness, sees only a rebellious child who has become another burden among burdens. The apocalyptic fight that ensues from this scene is what will lead them, eventually, to La Castellana.
The majority of the novel is set thirty-odd years before, and a year or so after, this scene. It follows islander Mercedes Delia as she watches her homeland corrupted, and her family destroyed, by the arrival of property developer Matthew Meade and the Yacht People who trail in his wake. Adopted as a plaything at twelve years old by Tatiana, Meade’s bored, spoiled daughter, she has been caught in their employ ever since, helpless as a fly struggling in a spider’s web. She works, now, in the Meades’ ostentatious house on the cliffs, facilitating their luxuries and awaiting her opportunity to break free.
Into this world comes Robin, riddled with guilt and desperately seeking her missing daughter, to find herself in a country whose entire population is dedicated to welcoming incomers’ money while maintaining rigid incuriosity as to what goes on in the villas that block their view of the sea. She’s got wind via the internet that her daughter might be among the crowds attending the flashy party the local Duke is throwing for his seventieth birthday, and is determined to get her back.
Gemma, meanwhile, has been travelling the world as a curated call-girl, servicing the super-young tastes of the super-rich and only vaguely aware that she qualifies, in legal terms, as one who’s been trafficked. Closeted with a group of other teenagers in the holiday home of billionaire Matthew Meade and his socialite daughter, Tatiana – a perk for their business contacts – she is beginning to realise that the glamour that first attracted her to this life has a darkness at its core that she may not survive…
--Marshal Zeringue
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