Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

(Harper, $26)

This true-crime story “grasps at serious literature,” said Jordan Michael Smith in The New York Observer. Robert Kolker’s book “does more to illuminate the frightening world of Internet-procured prostitution than any other work of which I’m aware.” Kolker avoids sensationalism in examining the still-unsolved case of the “Long Island Serial Killer.” Instead, he focuses on five victims—sex workers who went missing in 2010 before their bodies were found on or near Long Island’s Gilgo Beach. As this book describes their troubled lives, “heartbreak pours from its pages.”

Kolker paints “a far more nuanced picture of each young woman than any screaming headline could,” said Susannah Nesmith in The Miami Herald. Melissa Barthelemy, for instance, graduated from high school with straight A’s; Shannan Gilbert had a lovely singing voice. Yet like the others, they came from unstable households and ran into money problems, which they sought to overcome by selling themselves on Craigslist.org and Backpage.com. Kolker doesn’t always succeed in making each victim distinct, said Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post. “Nevertheless, he rewards the diligent reader with an in-depth look not just at the five victims but also at how thousands of young women live today.” To my mind, he provides a powerful argument against “keeping the oldest profession in the shadows,” where serial killers can murder these women with impunity. Prostitution “should be legalized.”

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Only if you think it is a victimless crime, said Mimi Swartz in The New York Times. Kolker proves, “hauntingly, that it is anything but”—and that we need to stop shaming sex workers. Kolker devotes the latter half of this book to the investigation of these victims’ deaths, which was marred by gross police incompetence. Surely the cops “would have done more to investigate the murders if the burlap-wrapped bodies had been those of corporate lawyers or stay-at-home moms.” As Kolker’s “compelling, nearly unputdownable narrative” demonstrates, these women deserved better.