Difficult Girls Audiobook By Veronica Bane cover art

Difficult Girls

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Difficult Girls

By: Veronica Bane
Narrated by: Valerie Rose Lohman
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $22.50

Buy for $22.50

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

A teen girl’s attempt at social reinvention takes a deadly turn when a co-worker disappears—and she learns she may have been the last person to see the missing girl—in this razor-sharp, murderously funny thriller debut.

After the incident last year, Greta Riley Green is looking for reinvention—a fresh start—and a job at Hyper Kid Magic Land, the local amusement park, seems like the perfect way to forge a new path . . . no matter what it takes.

So when fate pulls Greta into Mercy Goodwin’s orbit, it feels like things are looking up. Beautiful and confident, Mercy dazzles audiences daily. And at the first party of the summer, she picks Greta to confide in. Mercy has a secret to share, if Greta will just meet her the next day. It’s a sign that Greta’s truly fitting in.

Only, when the time comes, Mercy is a no-show—as she is everyday after that—and Greta knows something’s wrong. She can’t help thinking back to the night of the party. Did Mercy seem upset? Terrified, even? Could she be in trouble? It wouldn’t be the first time a talented young performer came to a sinister end at Hyper Kid. . . .

Of course, Greta has her own issues with the past, and the more she uncovers Hyper Kid’s secrets, the more her own threaten to surface. This job was meant to be a reboot, a summer without trouble. But trouble, it seems, finds Greta, and her past—and the bloody past of Hyper Kid—is about to catch up with her.

©2025 Veronica Bane (P)2025 Listening Library Humor Literature & Fiction Mysteries & Detectives Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Thrillers & Suspense Funny Magic

Critic reviews

“A thrilling debut. I dare you not to read it in one sitting.”—Cynthia Murphy, author of Win Lose Kill Die

“Sharp, witty, and oh so compelling, Difficult Girls cements Veronica Bane as an author to watch.”—Jessica Goodman, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Meadowbrook Murders and The Legacies

“Deeply heartfelt, laugh-out-loud funny, and filled with unexpected twists. Perfect for fans of Jessica Goodman and Karen M. McManus!”—Liz Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of the Agathas series and Murder Between Friends

Dear Listener,

What was the most fun aspect about writing this thriller?
"I loved coming up with all the details of the story’s theme park and building out its grisly history. Having worked at a theme park during my teenage years, I was intimately familiar with what it takes to flesh out a park and what goes on behind the scenes. All of that world-building was important to me because I wanted Hyper Kid Magic Land to feel like a truly lived in (or, in Greta’s case, worked in) place. I wanted the reader to know that there was more beyond what they were seeing through Greta’s eyes—like everything continued beyond the curtain of what we were able to see on the page. After creating the candy-colored world, adding murder mystery elements on top of that was just deliciously fun. After all, there’s nothing more exhilarating as a writer than to take something that should be one thing and twist it into something sinister, especially when you can add a healthy dollop of dark humor to it."– Veronica Bane, writer of Difficult Girls
All stars
Most relevant  
I love an amusement park backdrop and will probably read a book in that setting no matter the genre. In DIFFICULT GIRLS by Veronica Bane, Greta, like so many YA protagonists, thinks she’s smarter than the police and they she can solve a twenty-year-old murder and the disappearance of a coworker.

Greta has to be one of the most annoying main characters I’ve read in recent years. She’s never met a conclusion she hasn’t jumped into head first. Her stream of consciousness thoughts had me wanting to take her to a psychiatrist for anxiety meds.

Greta’s big “secret” was anticlimactic, something she could have told as a comedy of errors (not what the boy did, but what she did in response).

DIFFICULT GIRLS had a few great twists and turns that make the book a worthwhile read for me.

Annoying narrator and main character

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.