THE JILLS

When a Buffalo Bills cheerleader goes missing, her friend’s desperate search uncovers a drug network in New York and Ohio.

Performing as a dancer at Buffalo Bills games takes hours and hours of practice and preparation. But Virginia cherishes every opportunity to dance, as well as the tightly knit friendships among the women on the team. Like most of the Jills, she has to supplement her income by teaching fitness classes. Still, it’s a full life—one that she shares with another Jill, her best friend, Jeanine. One week, Jeanine doesn’t show up to dance at the game; Virginia is worried, and as the days pass with no word from Jeanine, her absence seems more and more ominous. Neither her wealthy boyfriend nor her trying-to-get-straight ex have seen Jeanine. Virginia’s investigations begin to uncover secrets and contradictions that make her even more concerned about her friend and start to send her into a spiral of her own, bringing up memories of everything she did to help her sister Laura kick a drug habit a few years earlier. Eventually, she has to turn to Laura for help, and they get pulled deeper and deeper into the dark side of Buffalo—the world of organized crime. Parkman spends a great deal of time in the early pages establishing the framework of the Jills as both a liberating and restricting force in Virginia’s life; as the novel progresses, though some of the friendships remain core, the dance troupe takes on much more sinister overtones through its connections to mob families. Parkman may have begun this novel with the intention, as she writes in an author’s note, of shedding light on the complex experiences of women in these NFL troupes, but it becomes a more traditional thriller—less commentary, more action—as the plot unfolds. Virginia all but leaves the Jills behind as she digs desperately into this mystery that overlaps with trauma in her past.

Surprisingly grim and psychologically complex.