A neon-lit roller rink. A missing girl. A beautiful boy with a dangerous past.
In the summer of 1977, seventeen-year-old Dolly starts working at Starlite, a small-town roller rink off Route 9 where the music is loud, the floors shine, and every girl seems to be pretending toward a better life.
At first, Starlite feels like escape. At home, Dolly is trapped in a house full of silence, beer, and things no one says out loud. At the rink, she becomes someone new beneath the mirror ball: noticed, wanted, almost free.
Then she meets Jude Turner.
Jude is beautiful, reckless, and impossible to ignore. He calls her Cherry, teaches her how to skate without holding the rail, and makes her feel as if she has stepped into the life she was meant to have.
But three years earlier, another girl loved Jude.
Her name was Lila Graves.
The town says Lila ran away. Dolly finds evidence that says otherwise.
As the summer darkens, Dolly must decide whom to trust: the boy who makes her feel alive, the best friend begging her to run, or the secrets hidden inside the walls of the place she thought would save her.
Haunting, nostalgic, and sharply suspenseful, The Girl at the Roller Rink is an adult upmarket gothic suspense novel about toxic first love, buried evidence, female friendship, and the small-town stories that make girls disappear.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
In the summer of 1977, seventeen-year-old Dolly starts working at Starlite, a small-town roller rink off Route 9 where the music is loud, the floors shine, and every girl seems to be pretending toward a better life.
At first, Starlite feels like escape. At home, Dolly is trapped in a house full of silence, beer, and things no one says out loud. At the rink, she becomes someone new beneath the mirror ball: noticed, wanted, almost free.
Then she meets Jude Turner.
Jude is beautiful, reckless, and impossible to ignore. He calls her Cherry, teaches her how to skate without holding the rail, and makes her feel as if she has stepped into the life she was meant to have.
But three years earlier, another girl loved Jude.
Her name was Lila Graves.
The town says Lila ran away. Dolly finds evidence that says otherwise.
As the summer darkens, Dolly must decide whom to trust: the boy who makes her feel alive, the best friend begging her to run, or the secrets hidden inside the walls of the place she thought would save her.
Haunting, nostalgic, and sharply suspenseful, The Girl at the Roller Rink is an adult upmarket gothic suspense novel about toxic first love, buried evidence, female friendship, and the small-town stories that make girls disappear.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Used availability for Sophia Clark's The Girl at the Roller Rink