Three young women from a small Midwest town are forced to face the secrets from their pasts when one confronts her own mortality — and decides she doesn’t want to leave the world all alone.

Twenty years before, Marlene, Valarie and Hope each held separate pieces of the puzzle in the disappearance of a high-school classmate before going their own ways — and trying to leave the past behind where they thought it belonged, in a shallow farmland grave. Valarie and Hope stayed in Hillsboro, at drastically different ends of the town’s unforgiving social spectrum, while Marlene turned tail for the big city and turned her teenage pain into a bestselling novel.

But now, all three troubled young women will have to come together, again, in Hillsboro. They’ll have to compare notes, however reluctant they are to start. They’ll have to confront their darkest assumptions. And they’ll have to construct shaky bridges of trust to one another across the town’s cruel and calcified class divides.

And Marlene, Valarie and Hope will have to come to grips with their ghastly secrets against death’s ticking clock. Against their own fearful and selfish desires. Against a police chief who’s getting too close to the explosive truth. Against an old woman who would protect the pride of her family’s past at almost any price. And against others in Hillsboro who would do anything — including adding to the body count — to protect their own dark and deadly interests.

THE FRIENDS is an explosive, richly atmospheric small-town thriller in the mold of critically acclaimed suspense novels of the rural Midwest by Gillian Flynn, Laura McHugh, Mindy Mejia, Chris Harding Thornton, Heather Levy, John Galligan and Allan Eskens.