The Little Friend

<p><P>Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. <br>The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother&#8217;s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents&#8217; yard. Twelve years later Robin&#8217;s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin&#8217;s sister Harriet&#8212;unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson&#151;sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town&#8217;s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family&#8217;s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and &#8220;a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens&#8221; (<i>The New York Times Book Review</i>), <b>The Little Friend</b> is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.</p><h3>The New York Times Book Review</h3><p><i>The Little Friend</i> might be described as a young-adult novel for grown-ups, since it can carry us back to the breathless state of adolescent literary discovery, when we read to be terrified beyond measure and, through our terror, to try to figure out the world and our place in it.</p>