Darling Girls

• Author: Sally Hepworth
• Genre: Mystery/Thriller
• Publication Date: April 23, 2024
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me with an ARC of this book and an ALC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: child abuse (physical and sexual), childhood trauma, domestic violence

SISTERS, SECRETS, LOVE, AND MURDER… Sally Hepworth’s new novel has it all.

For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. As young girls they were rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother, Miss Fairchild, on an idyllic farming estate and given an elusive second chance at a happy family life.

But their childhood wasn’t the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. Miss Fairchild had rules. Miss Fairchild could be unpredictable. And Miss Fairchild was never, ever to be crossed. In a moment of desperation, the three broke away from Miss Fairchild and thought they were free. Even though they never saw her again, she was always somewhere in the shadows of their minds. When a body is discovered under the home they grew up in, the foster sisters find themselves thrust into the spotlight as key witnesses. Or are they prime suspects?

A thrilling page-turner of sisterhood, secrets, love, and murder by New York Times bestselling author Sally Hepworth.

I’ve read a few books by Sally Hepworth, and for the most part, I enjoy her writing. I also really like the fact that they’re set in Australia and the audiobook narrators have Australian accents, but they aren’t so strong that I can’t understand them. And yes, I have had that problem in the past with a different author. 

I wound up alternating my reading between the ebook and the audiobook, since I enjoyed the accent of the narrator, Jessica Clarke, and the way that she narrated the book. She did a great job with this story, and I enjoyed how easily she slipped between characters during the POV shifts in the story. 

It isn’t just the characters that we slip between, since this is a dual timeline story. We gradually learn the story through the eyes of each character both “then” and “now.” Jessica, Norah, and Alicia are sisters through their time spent with Miss Fairchild, a foster mother who seemed to offer everything they could possibly ask for. Except like most things that seem too good to be true, this is too. Miss Fairchild isn’t the dream foster mother they hoped for, but quickly reveals herself to be an abusive nightmare. Jessica is the first girl to enter Miss Fairchild’s home, at the age of five, willing to endure ever-growing levels of isolation in order to keep the affection of Miss Fairchild. Norah follows, an eleven-year-old with violent tendencies due to her background. Alicia, a good-natured girl, comes to live with them at age 12 after her grandmother has an accident and has to stay at a rehab for a while.

In the present day, each of the women are struggling with their own inner conflicts. For Jessica, it’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and an addiction to prescription pills that she has been stealing from the houses of her clients, leading to the implosion of her business and marriage. Norah is facing potential incarceration as a result of her uncontrolled anger issues. And Alicia is a social worker, helping children to find safe living arrangements, but her own unresolved issues make it difficult for her to move on from her past and get into a healthy relationship and build a family for herself. 

But when police get involved and let them know that human remains have been found beneath the house which they have tried very hard to put behind them, they can no longer escape their past. This is the central mystery to the story—whose remains are these? And who put them there? 

We slowly learn more about each of the girls, and what they went through in Miss Fairchild’s care, but we also peel back the layers of the onion on the personality of each of the women in the present day. Each of the sisters grew on me in a different way. Norah is the one that I found myself identifying with initially, with her combination of sensitivity and sarcasm to protect vulnerable core, while Alicia was just too sweet not to like. She’s one of those genuinely good-hearted people that you can’t dislike even if you want to. And Jessica had my feelings all over the place during the book, as more information is revealed, but once her true personality is revealed, it was much easier to empathize with her.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. It kept me intrigued, and I was surprised by the plot twists and the big reveal. However, the ending kind of left me a little disappointed, and I didn’t love that last twist. It didn’t add anything to the story, and felt like it was there more to ruffle feathers than anything else. The only other thing that I wasn’t exactly thrilled about was the use of “abused child in foster care” as a trope. While I know that this does happen and far more than should ever be acceptable, i’m not generally a fan of this being used as a trope, and think it comes up in books, shows, and movies to the point where it seems as though every single foster situation is abusive, and there aren’t ever any good ones. Other than those things, I was here for the story. Nothing really played out as I had expected, and it kept me engaged from the start to the finish. And I highly recommend the audiobook—Jessica Clarke does a wonderful job and her Australian accent is fantastic to listen to (and easy to understand even if you’re an uncultured swine aka American like me 🤣). Is it just an American thing to love hearing accents different from my own? A me thing? Or is this basically universal? Regardless, while this isn’t my favorite Hepworth novel, it’s still a really good one.

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