Dead girls don’t just force detectives to reckon with their own capacity for evil and virtue they also cause them to turn over the rocks in insular communities and expose wriggling secrets to the light. Dead-girl mysteries are often set in such sleepy, half-forgotten corners of the world: small towns, rural backwaters, suburbs that pride themselves on their tranquillity and safety. How could Alyona and Sophia be so foolish, so untutored in the perils of stranger danger, and what sort of mother would allow her young daughters to wander around unsupervised? The sisters live in Kamchatka, a volcano-studded peninsula in the Russian Far East that is basically inaccessible by land. This chapter, titled “August,” ends with him driving the panicked girls off to parts unknown. At the beach, the two girls meet a man and, out of innocence and admiration for his magnificent car, accept his offer of a ride. Each of the novel’s thirteen chapters is told from the perspective of a different female character, beginning with eleven-year-old Alyona Golosovskaya, who is looking after her younger sister, Sophia, while their mother works during the day.

Women novelists have been ingeniously dismantling this convention of late, both within the crime-fiction genre (Gillian Flynn’s “ Gone Girl”) and outside of it, as in Julia Phillips’s invigoratingly hard-to-classify new novel, “ Disappearing Earth” (Knopf). The violence redoubles her loss is just the means to his gain. In “ Dead Girls,” Alice Bolin writes about television series, like “ Twin Peaks” and “ True Detective,” in which “the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” The girl is merely an opportunity for the detective to confront and to redeem his own capacity for violence: confront it by discovering the identity of the culprit (often an authority figure, not unlike the detective himself) and redeem it by capturing and punishing the culprit. A dead or missing girl is such a common device in crime fiction that its use now prompts raised eyebrows.

Disappearing earth characters