🤰🤰🤰🤰1/2
The Water Lies
Amy Myerson
347 pages
Thomas & Mercer
Goodreads/ Amazon/Bookshop.org
This is the first book I have read by Amy Myerson but it will not be my last. This was a gripping psychological suspense novel with well developed characters and setting. It kept me guessing more or less until the end. In other words, it did everything that a suspense novel is supposed to do.
In this novel, Tessa, a young pregnant woman with a child, lives near a canal where a woman’s body is found. Because her young son seems to know this woman, calling her by a nickname, she thinks that something is amiss. The mother of the dead woman, Barb, who was estranged from her dead daughter, also thinks, contrary to the police, that something is wrong; that her daughter did not just accidentally die there.
I loved all of the details about the canal which, while it was an up and coming place for young families to live, seemed like an appropriately sinister place for a body to be found. It was a wonderful use of setting, continued throughout the book, that adds to the plot and the depth of the novel.
Tessa and Barb meet and get together to try and solve the mystery, uncovering various secrets along the way, which build the tension. I do enjoy amateur sleuths but it can be difficult to find a balance between them not being portrayed as knowing too much and not knowing enough. I do think that Myerson walks that line. I also think the author did a good job of exploring Tessa’s impending motherhood, using her intuition as a factor in the sleuthing. I also liked the alternating perspectives of Tessa and Barb, clearly marked for the reader; a pet peeve of mine is having to do too much work to figure out whose viewpoint is being expressed. The alternating perspective allows readers to get to know each character as well as to see what each’s view of the other is.
I think the only thing that might have improved the novel was to have a little more foreshadowing and a little less rushing at the end to wrap things up, where the reader can see what happens; in other words, it got slightly more predictable at the end. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the novel and will explore more by this author. Four and a half stars, rounded to five. Thanks to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for providing me with an advanced copy of this book. All opinions herein are completely my own.
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