Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2018 coming-of-age murder mystery novel by American zoologist Delia Owens.

The first timeline describes the life and adventures of a young girl named Kya as she grows up isolated in the marshes of North Carolina.

The second timeline follows an investigation into the apparent murder of Chase Andrews, a local celebrity of Barkley Cove, a fictional coastal town of North Carolina.

Unable to read or write, Kya makes paintings of the objects, and the marsh's creatures and shorelines, with watercolors her mother left behind.

She survives by gardening and trading fresh mussels and smoked fish for money and fuel from Jumpin', a black man who owns a gasoline station at the boat dock.

Chase Andrews, Barkley Cove's star quarterback and playboy, invites Kya, aged 19, to a picnic, and tries to have sex with her.

He shows her an abandoned fire tower, and she gives him a necklace of a shell he found during their picnic, strung on a rawhide string.

Her brother Jodie, now in the Army, returns and breaks the news that their mother had been mentally ill and had died of leukemia two years earlier.

After she returns the next day, Chase is found dead beneath the fire tower, with no tracks or fingerprints nearby due to the tide.

He learns the shell necklace Kya gave to Chase was missing when his body was found, even though he wore it the night he died.

[2] "Crawdad" is a regional term, and the book's success sparked a rise in online queries about the word's meaning.

[3] Adrian Horton, in The Guardian, describes the book as "a fantasy of grit and purity", offering "a seductive blend of romance, murder mystery and feral coming-of-age".

Further, he writes, the book treats the complications of relationships, physical hardship, and racism as "wallpaper", preferring to focus on its "central nature girl fantasy of self-reliance".

[5] He comments that a coming-of-age romance could be sentimental, but that this tendency is countered by the crime fiction side of the novel.

[5] The theme of ethology, Delia Owens' profession, the study of animal behavior, runs through the book.

Kya reads about ethology, including an article titled "Sneaky Fuckers", where she learns about female fireflies, who use their coded flashing light signal to lure a male of another species to his death, and about female mantises who lure a male mate and start eating the mate's head and thorax while his abdomen is still copulating with her.

Lawson comments that this "spectacularly extend[s]" the trope of having a wildlife documentary in the background while the characters engage in violence or sex.

[5] Aspects of Kya's life and the novel's narrative choices, including its attitude towards its black characters, are said to be reminiscent of Owens's time in Zambia, where she, her then husband, and his son are still wanted for questioning in the killing of an alleged poacher captured on film in a 1996 report by ABC News.

[11] On Book Marks, based on ten critics: two "rave", six "positive", one "mixed", and one "pan".