Robert Kolker's Lost Girls, a book about the victims of the Long Island serial killer, covers the standard true-crime territory: the potential suspects, the police investigation, and the details about the crimes themselves. But more importantly, the book, through exhaustive reporting, details the lives of the women killed — all of whom were prostitutes from poor, "downwardly mobile, working-class communities” as Kolker put it in our phone interview yesterday. Instead of describing them as anonymous victims secondary to the spectacle of the unsolved crimes, Kolker builds the book around the women, portraying them as the daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends that they were to the dozens of people who still mourn them.