Three sisters, very close, best friends, and an enigma to all that know them, including their parents.

Grey is the oldest, now 21 and a fashion icon with her range of other-worldly nature inspired clothing like no other. People have always gravitated to mega-famous Grey, her demeanor anything from gentle and loving with her youngest sister, to an ice queen, to someone to fear in the darkness.

Vivi at 19 is the opposite. Brash, badass and a killer bass guitar player in her rock band (Sisters of the Sacred), she drinks like a fish, has collected enough piercings to sink a ship, and a don’t give a toss attitude to most things in life.

Iris is 17, the only one at home since her sisters left four years before. Iris’ focus is her studies at an exclusive and expensive school, keeping her head down, avoiding bullies and keeping her mother (who they all call Cate), happy.

No matter how Iris tries to be incognito at school, it’s impossible. Grey is multi-million-follower-social-media-famous and there is also their combined strange history. Ten years before, all three girls vanished from a street in Edinburgh only to appear one month later – with no idea where they’d been.

Crime drama documentaries and TV shows have been made about the Hollow Sisters over the years ensuring no-one forgot them. Iris’ sisters blew off the attention not caring about the publicity, but Iris was only 7 when it happened and is aware she can’t remember anything before her disappearance either.

When Grey vanishes again without any warning, Iris and Vivi quickly realise they are the only ones who can find her. The more they explore Grey’s multiple apartments, the more clues they find and the darker her disappearance becomes. Bloodbaths, dead bodies, carrion flowers and the smell of rotting vegetation begins to sink into their skin and their psyche.

Iris begins having flashbacks of the sisters’ disappearance, and then a fashion mag interview reveals the unthinkable. Where is Grey? What does she know about their abduction years before? Was it an abduction or something else, something or somewhere dark, rancid and dangerous.

The most pressing question of all – who or what is the shirtless man with the horned skull mask following them?

The menace that oozes from the pages of this YA novel is just like the vines and vegetation that creep through the story – threatening, macabre, and rotting. The writing is as beautiful as the disturbing carrion flowers that bloom in bizarre and unexpected places.

The three sisters are all intriguing in their separate identities and endearing in their bond with one another, but always holding me with an over-arching question. What happened to them 10 years before and why don’t they remember? 

The plot darkens deliciously as the truth is slowly exposed, along with a secret kept, blood spattered walls, a body in a cupboard, a girl with a shotgun, and broken doorways that once went somewhere and then went somewhere else.

Brilliant. Not to mention the exquisite cover!

Author – Krystal Sutherland

Age – 15+

(Menace, Sisters, Siblings, Disappearance, Mystery, Secrets, Dark, Foreboding, Family, Madness, Suicide, Fashion, Social-media, Love, Search, Fantasy, Disguise, Murder, Nature, Death, Horror, Plants)