The Little Friend

Bestselling novelist Donna Tartt makes a triumphant comeback with a very ambitious and completely engrossing tale of youth, innocence, and evil.

The story takes place in Alexandria, Mississippi, on Mother's Day, when Robin Cleve Dufresnes, a little child, was discovered hanging from a tree in his parent's yard. Twelve years later, the murder of Robin is still unsolved, and his family is still inconsolable. Thus, it happens that Robin's sister Harriet—unnervingly intelligent, unbearably driven, and disproportionately inspired by Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson's fiction—sets out to identify his murderer. Harriet defies the strict racial and caste boundaries in her community and delves deeply into her family's painful past with the sole assistance of her devoted friend Hely.