The Girls Before by Kate Alice Marshall

e-ALC, 11:00:55
Narrated by: Ina Barrón & Karissa Vacker
Release Date: February 24, 2026
Published by: Macmillan Audio
Read from: February 18-19, 2026
 Stand-alone
Source:  Google Play (I received this ALC free from the publisher and Google Play. This did nothing to influence my review!)
Content Warning: Confinement, Child Death, Death, Addiction, Alcoholism, Murder, Kidnapping, Child Abuse, Cursing
For Readers Interested In: Audio, DEAR, Most Anticipated, Realistic Fiction, Thrillers

    From the bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, and A Killing Cold, a new novel about a search & rescue expert, a kidnapped woman, and the lost girls who haunt them both.
     There is a girl in a basement.
     The door has stopped opening.
     The light is gone.
     Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?
     Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

*MY THOUGHTS*

I wish y’all could see my notes on this for real. I have approximately 35 WTF and 22 WHATs?! on 3 pages lol It really is the type of book that will make you start asking if you really read what you thought you read lol It was a hot mess.

The number one thing I loved about this was the characters. Literally everyone in this book is crazy. I mean everyone. And no one tells the truth. And if you think you want to tell the truth, there’s someone there that will convince you not to lol And even if you think you’ll get the person whodunit, I can promise you you don’t know as much as you think you do lol

Which brings me to the mystery. I loved it. When I tell you I was so annoyed with these people. I wrote so many notes down. Every time something happened. I kept wondering why no one wanted to find out anything and why no one actually wanted to help ol girl even look a little bit. I blamed literally every character I had come across lol

When things started heating up, it was evident that there was so much more going on in this book than I knew. I had no idea what was coming in this book lol It was a lot. I wish I could tell y’all why I’m laughing, but it would spoil the whole thing. Let’s just say get to the end…. And then ask yourself if that was right too? I sat there for a minute trying to figure it out. And let me tell you, I still don’t know lol

This was a bunch of chaos. I didn’t think there is enough words for me to explain anymore without spoilers, but this was crazy. Which obviously means I enjoyed it lol If y’all read this, please tell me if you felt the same way I did while reading lol

Overall, I give this