The Girls Before by Kate Alice Marshall: Audiobook Review of A Haunting Story of Survival and Obsession

Some girls disappear. Others refuse to be forgotten.

Synopsis

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.

Audiobook review

 4–4.5 stars

I’ve read several books by Kate Alice Marshall, and I’ve loved every single one — this one is no exception.

Told through dual POVs and brought to life by two excellent narrators (Ina Barrón and Karissa Vacker), I was pulled into this story of disappearance from the very start.

We follow a girl known only as Stranger, held captive in a dark, suffocating place, with barely any food or water left. Through fragments and silences, we understand the horror she has endured — and the kind of monster who put her there.

To survive, she turns to the girls before — the ones who were imprisoned before her, who left messages scratched into the walls. Their voices become her guide, her warning, her last hope. What happens next, I won’t spoil… but my heart ached for her. She is, above all, a survivor.

The second POV follows Audrey, a school counselor trained in search and rescue. With her dog Barry, she has spent years helping find missing people. But behind her dedication lies something deeper — guilt.

Audrey has never recovered from the disappearance of her best friend Janie. Haunted by what she couldn’t prevent, she throws herself into every case, especially when another girl goes missing. This time, it’s Megan — a girl no one seems to be looking for. But Audrey won’t let her become just another name.

Kate Alice Marshall delivers a deeply atmospheric thriller featuring Audrey, a flawed, obsessive heroine. Her need to find the truth has become a compulsion, one that isolates her and puts her in danger. I wanted her to find the truth yet I feared for her life too!

The story weaves in elements of folklore — whispers of a witch, echoes of the dead girls — adding a subtle, almost supernatural layer that makes the tension even more unsettling.

The pacing is steady, never rushed. The story takes its time, slowly unraveling the past, the trauma, and the connections between the girls.

I was completely immersed from beginning to end. I LOVED every minute of this listening experience!

Thanks for reading.

Sophie