On the first page of Dizz Tate's debut novel Brutes, a 14-year-old girl has gone missing from Falls Landing, Florida, where screams from nearby theme parks ripple through the air and a foreboding lake divides a walled-off development from rundown apartment towers.
The missing girl, a TV preacher's daughter named Sammy Liu-Lou, had lived sheltered behind the development's tall white walls, and her disappearance immediately becomes an event. Women who seem "built for church, in skorts and pastel-colored sweaters" strap on headlamps and strike out into the summer night in search of the girl, avoiding the lake that gleams as black as an oil slick.
