Fast Boys and Pretty Girls by Lo Patrick,

 A Haunting Return to the Heart of Georgia

“One year lasts a lifetime when it’s the year that changes everything” shares former teen model Danielle “Dani” Greer in Fast Boys and Pretty Girls by Lo Patrick, available July 8. As Dani, she saw New York City, Miami, and Paris, but after a short modeling career, Danielle moves back to Pressville, a small town modeled after Ellijay, Georgia, in a story that burns slowly and leaves deep scars.

Now married with four daughters all living in her childhood home, Danielle wakes from a nap to the excitement of the girls’ discovery of a body in the wooded ravine behind their house. While the majority of the book flashes back to Dani’s modeling years when she found herself enamored with a Georgia underage misfit, the current timeline revolves around the mystery surrounding the bones found on Danielle’s property.

As Danielle reveals that her boyfriend died in a motorcycle wreck on the curve of the road in front of her house more than a dozen years ago, she suspects that she knows the identity of the body in the woods although she has no idea how it could have ended up there. The past refuses to stay buried.

The investigation of the found remains by Cady Benson, a woman whose trajectory has been similar to Danielle’s with a brief career in New York and now settled as a police officer in Pressville, has triggered Danielle’s mental visit back to the confusing time in her life when she was a 17-year-old on her own in the Big Apple trying to carve out a modeling career.

Once again Danielle enters a puzzling phase in her life causing her to ask, could it be who I think it is buried in the woods? How much if anything do I know about the quickly identified body?

A satisfying exploration of love, loss, and the weight of secrets in small-town America, a surprising twist will devastate Danielle’s family.

Georgia native Lo Patrick is proving to be a compelling voice in Southern mystery fiction. A lawyer-turned-writer, she lives in the Atlanta suburbs with her family. Her debut novel, The Floating Girls, earned a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly in 2022, and she followed it with The Night the River Wept, another gripping Southern-crime tale.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting June 25, 2025.

I would like to thank Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.