One generation plants trees, the next gets shade.

Gillian Flynn has created a novel with such a powerful ending that the reader will want to reread the book immediately.

Libby Day is only 7 when her mother and two sisters are massacred. She is the witness against her brother, Ben, who is found guilty of the crime.

Now, twenty five years have past and her money is running out. She gets a letter from the Kill Club, a group of crime solving wannabees. They feel that Ben has wrongly been sentenced for the crime. Libby agrees to meet with them and for a fee she agrees to look into the deaths of her family and report her findings to the club.

From this point the story flash backs in alternating chapters so we can see where Libby is with her investigation and back to the time just prior to the murders. We see what the family was going through. Libby's mother, Patty Day, was going through tough times in attempting to raise four children by herself. She feared the farm was going to be lost to foreclosure. Ben was fifteen, a lonely teenager with few friends and a meddling sister, Michelle, who taunted him.

As Libby gets closer to the answers of what happened that night, she is suddenly cast back to the same position she was in twenty five years ago, running for her life with a killer intending to make her a final victim.

There is power and uniqueness in this story. Libby is a dark, yet interesting character. She is flawed but brave and determined to find the answers to what happened to her family. The pace of the story is well conceived as if it had a heart-beat that sped up as the story draws to an end with the reader moving to the edge of their seat to see what happens to Libby.

The author, Gillian Flynn, has been nominated for an Edgar award for her novel, "Sharp Objects" which won two British Daggers. Movie rights to that novel have been sold and the author is working on the screen adaptation.