Book Club Collection: 'Lost Girls' by Robert Kolker

Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Kolker delivers a haunting and humanizing account of the true-life search for a serial killer still at large on Long Island, in a compelling tale of unsolved murder and Internet prostitution.

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert, after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life, went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist prostitute who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County Police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan's.

There was Maureen Brainard-Barnes, last seen at Penn Station in Manhattan three years earlier, and Melissa Barthelemy, last seen in the Bronx in 2009. There was Megan Waterman, last seen leaving a hotel in Hauppage, Long Island, just a month after Shannan's disappearance in 2010, and Amber Lynn Costello, last seen leaving a house in West Babylon a few months later that same year. Like Shannan, all four women were petite and in their twenties, they all came from out of town to work as escorts, and they all advertised on Craigslist and its competitor, Backpage.

In a triumph of reporting—and in a riveting narrative—Robert Kolker presents the first detailed look at the shadow world of escorts in the Internet age, where making a living is easier than ever and the dangers remain all too real. He has talked exhaustively with the friends and family of each woman to reveal the three-dimensional truths about their lives, the struggling towns they came from, and the dreams they chased. And he has gained unique access to the Oak Beach neighborhood that has found itself the focus of national media scrutiny—where the police have flailed, the body count has risen, and the neighbors have begun pointing fingers at one another.

There, in a remote community, out of sight of the beaches and marinas scattered along the South Shore barrier islands, the women's stories come together in death and dark mystery. Lost Girls is a portrait not just of five women, but of unsolved murder in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.
(Summary provided by the publisher.)

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times best-seller and selection of Oprah's Book Club that was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate; one of the year’s best by NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and Amazon;  the #1 book of the year by People; and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times best-seller and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the quarter century. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Marshall Project, Bloomberg Businessweek, and New York magazine.

Kolker’s magazine journalism most often takes the form of gripping, humane narratives. Among his subjects: perhaps the most unbelievable survival story to come out of World War II; the most audacious embezzlement scandal in the history of American public education; the man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early; the comedy stars who created and starred in This Is Spinal Tap and somehow never saw a dime’s profit from it; the scientists who developed the revolutionary gene-editing process known as CRISPR and then went to battle over the credit; the slow, sad decline of the New York City subway system; the police detective who brought down perhaps the world’s largest online child-exploitation ring; the defiant Ukrainian oligarch in the crosshairs of the investigators probing Donald Trump; the tenacious data miner who has built a tool to find serial killers and close countless ancient cold cases (if police are willing to use it); the “Subway Superman” grappling with sudden fame; a young academic star rising up from the inner city, only to be gunned down in her old neighborhood; the secret history of how the FBI finally tracked down the fugitive abortion-doctor assassin James Kopp; and the FBI Osama bin Laden expert killed in the World Trade Center attacks. His 2006 investigation into sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community helped bring an abuser to justice and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. His exploration of an eighteen-year murder-exoneration case and the police tactics that can lead to false confessions received the Harry Frank Guggenheim 2011 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Other articles of note include the police shooting of Sean Bell, a close look at New York’s homelessness epidemic, and New York’s cover stories about airport safety and security, cheating at Stuyvesant High School, and Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s Miracle on the Hudson.

Lost Girls was adapted for a feature film, directed by Liz Garbus and starring Amy Ryan and Gabriel Byrne, released by Netflix in 2020.

“The Bad Superintendent,”  Kolker's 2004 New York magazine story about a public-school embezzlement scandal,  was adapted for the feature film Bad Education, starring Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, released on HBO in 2020.
(Biography provided by the author)