Amy Stuart | STILL WATER

Plot (via Goodreads):

HOW DO YOU FIND THE TRUTH IN A TOWN FULL OF SECRETS?

Clare has to find them.

Sally Proulx and her young boy have mysteriously disappeared in the stormy town of High River. Clare is hired to track them down, hoping against all odds to find them alive. But High River isn’t your typical town. It’s a place where women run to—women who want to escape their past. They run to Helen Haines, a matriarch who offers them safe haven and anonymity. Pretending to be Sally’s long-lost friend, Clare turns up and starts asking questions, but nothing prepares her for the swirl of deception and the depth of the lies.

Did Sally drown? Did her son? Was it an accident, or is their disappearance part of something bigger?

In a town where secrets are crucial to survival, everyone is hiding something. Detectives Somers and Rourke clearly have an ulterior motive beyond solving the case. Malcolm Boon, who hired Clare, knows more about her than he reveals. And Helen is concealing a tragic family history of her own. As the truth surges through High River, Clare must face the very thing she has so desperately been running from, even if it comes at a devastating cost. Compulsively gripping and twisty, Still Water is a deep dive of a thriller that will leave you breathless.

Review:

Amy Stuart is back and Clare is ready for another mystery. I really enjoyed this one for its multi-layered story-line, slow-burning mystery(s), and for Stuarts ability to bring her reader into a whole other town with even more characters to get to enjoy reading and suspect of murder.

I felt like Stuart stepped up her game a bit with this one. While it was still a slower pace than what I am used to, Stuart's ability to make the plot a little more elaborate was enjoyable and made me move through this one a little faster than I did the previous effort. I enjoyed the plot to her first novel a little more, but with this one I felt like I was constantly learning something new and the pieces to the puzzle came a little bit more frequently. The characters in this one were not only purposeful, but they carried the story to this one excellently by either giving Clare exactly what she's looking for, being a red herring, or the character who's secrets just might be what we need to find out what is really happening in this town.

Again, a perfect read for fans of Lifetime thrillers. I also kind of caught a little similarities with SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn. This one had an increase with the pacing a small amount and again featured an ending that was satisfying and still left the reader wanting more.

Special thanks to Touchstone Books for providing me with this copy in exchange for my honest review.

Rating: 3.5/5