What a phone call to receive.

Jessica, Norah, and Alicia all received a call from a detective asking that they meet at their childhood home to discuss a discovery of bones under it.

Their childhood home was a foster home they lived in under the "loving" care of Miss Fairchild. In actuality, she wasn't loving. She was a task master and abusive.

We found out from each character in alternating chapters what went on at that house, and we then move to present day.

Miss Hepworth keeps you intrigued with the intense happenings from their childhood under the care of Miss Fairchild.

Present day was intense too as you will try as I did to figure out whose bones they were and what Miss Fairchild was planning to do them now when she showed up for questioning by the police about the finding.

Will you figure out whose bones they are?

Surprise after surprise - twist after twist - with the ending one being the best.

You won’t want to put the book down even though the chapters about their time in foster care are unsettling and upsetting.

This is Ms. Hepworth's best yet. 5/5

Thank you to the publisher for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

DARLING GIRLS is my fourth Sally Hepworth book; just as with the other three, I liked this book very much. So it seems I can count on Hepworth to be one of my go-to authors.

But it didn't look like DARLING GIRLS was going to be another winner at first. Miss Fairchild accumulates foster children over the years, three of them, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia, permanent placements. Miss Fairchild is not only unfit in her role as foster mother; to these three children, in particular, she is darn right sadistic. And it is those chapters where Hepworth describes the sadism that almost made me put the book down.

Don't do it. Hepworth doesn't dwell on those awful parts; she establishes the fact that the woman was horrid. You don't want to miss this story. You want to meet Amy, who came after the three girls were barely in their teens. Then Amy disappeared one day. That was when the girls finally put their foot down. Years later they're adults when police notify them that human bones have been found buried beneath the house they grew up in.

The mystery: whose bones and who put them there?

I'm glad I read another Hepworth novel and look forward to more.