The Van Apfel girls are gone

In 1992, eleven-year-old Tikka Malloy and her older sister Laura are shocked to learn that their friends and playmates the Van Apfel girls--Ruth, Hannah, and Cordelia--have disappeared. Perhaps they ran away from their too-strict evangelical parents, or perhaps someone kidnapped them. Years pass and their disappearance is never solved, and now the adult Tikka returns to Australia to try to make sense of what happened that summer of 1992.