When a young woman in France is caught on camera the moment she is struck by a car, the video goes viral. More shocking, it turns out, is the fact that she was the American exchange student of a missing French family and she seemed to have stumbled, bruised and barefoot, from the forest with no memory of what happened to her. Seventeen-year-old Quinn Perkins is one of the two main characters that Kate Horsley’s thriller, THE AMERICAN GIRL, focuses on. Helping her recover her memory, but mostly to get a good scoop, is the ambitious and troubled journalist Molly Swift. Each woman is barely able to contain her own psychological darkness, and each finds in the other a seemingly reliable ally as the police work to discover the whereabouts of Quinn’s host family. But dangerous secrets threaten to keep the truth hidden and put both Quinn and Molly in peril.

"There is all the requisite small town shadiness, some creepy characters and even spooky caves to provide shadowy atmosphere."

The drama unfolds in a series of blog entries and video diaries by Quinn and recollections from Molly. Readers are first introduced to Quinn as she sits in the hospital in St. Roch, having woken from a coma, trying to regain memory of the car accident and any information that could lead police to her missing host family. Molly is vacationing in nearby Paris when she sees the video and hears the news of the mysterious girl. As the lead investigator for the podcast “American Confessional,” Molly knows this will be a compelling and popular story for her listeners. But how to get access to Quinn? When a nun mistakes her for a relative, Molly decides to cast herself as Quinn’s aunt, taking advantage of the young lady’s amnesia.

As the days go by, Molly worries that Quinn will realize they are not related before her investigation is complete. She also manages to begin a boozy affair with Inspector Valentin, the dashing detective in charge of Quinn’s case and the disappearance of the Blavette family. While readers know from the start that Molly is playing Quinn for the sake of her story, Quinn’s involvement in the disappearance of the Blavette family and her own motivations are only slowly revealed. Little by little, Horsley has Quinn divulge what her life in France was like.

Émilie Blavette has been raising her two teenage children alone since her husband went missing. Because the school she ran was shut down after the death of a student, she has made ends meet with the money she receives from hosting foreign exchange students. But instead of a warm welcome, Quinn finds Émilie to be cruel and hostile. Quinn hopes to bond with Noémie Blavette, but their relationship is rocky. Noémie bears the brunt of her mother’s anger and acts out in dangerous ways. When Raphael Blavette returns from university, Quinn falls head over heels, and the feelings seem to be mutual. But Raphael may prove to be the most dangerous of the Blavette family, and before she knows it, Quinn is trapped by him in a seedy world of crime. What seemed at first like an odd yet simple accident quickly turns into a complicated series of crimes, and it becomes obvious that no one is quite who they seem.

THE AMERICAN GIRL is a page-turning, if not an inventive, thriller. There is all the requisite small town shadiness, some creepy characters and even spooky caves to provide shadowy atmosphere. The novel is mostly suspenseful and often unsettling, with Horsley successfully delivering two characters in tension and playing with the idea of the “unreliable narrator.”