Jackal

 Jackal by Erin E. Adams, 352 pages.

Liz Rocher returns to her hometown in Johnstown, Pennsylvania only very reluctantly. But it's her best friend's wedding, and after a traumatic breakup in New York she has to prove to herself she can still trust her own judgement. Then her best friend's daughter (who is also her own beloved stepdaughter) goes missing in the woods the night of the wedding, and the only sign is a bloodstained scrap of her dress. In the desperate search for the little girl Liz learns that she is not the first little black girl to go missing in those woods, and if she ever wants to find her Liz is going to have to get to the bottom of dozens of disappearances and deaths stretching back decades, including an encounter from her own youth that left her scarred.

This book is a really compelling piece of social horror, and an engaging mystery. For the first half of the book or so I wasn't even certain what genre it was going to turn out to be. And there is just so much plausible evil in this book that I wasn't certain who the villain was until the book revealed it. This was a really interesting read, and I would definitely recommend it for fans of the genre.