Author Stories Podcast Episode 1127 | Jessica Chiarella Interview


Today’s author interview guest is Jessica Chiarella, author of The Lost Girls.

When her true-crime podcast becomes an overnight sensation, a young woman is pulled into the web of a case that may offer a surprising connection to her own sister’s disappearance years earlier.

It’s been more than twenty years since Marti Reese’s sister, Maggie, disappeared. Only eight-years-old at the time, Marti can’t remember what happened, just that Maggie got into a car and never returned. After years of grief and countless false leads, Marti is coping as best she can: abandoning her marriage, drinking to forget, and documenting her never-ending search via a true-crime podcast. But when the podcast becomes an unexpected hit and Marti thinks she’s finally ready to put it all behind her, a mysterious woman calls with new information that could lead her down a dangerous path.

For years, Ava Vreeland has been fighting to overturn her brother’s murder conviction. After finding strange similarities between the two cases, Ava is certain there’s a connection between the murder and Maggie’s disappearance, one that could prove her brother’s innocence. Together, Marti and Ava embark on a quest for the truth, but the more Marti digs, the more she’s shaken by the answers she might find, and what it is she’s even searching for…

Jessica Chiarella is the author of the novel And Again, which was the August 2016 Target Book Club Pick. She holds an MA in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. Her second novel, The Lost Girls, is forthcoming from Putnam in July of 2021. She lives in Chicago with her dog, Leia.

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