Title: The Drowning
Expected publication: 1 January 2019
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
Every seven years, a boy disappears from Camp Waukeelo.
Who will be next?
It doesn’t take long for a little boy to disappear. Joey Proctor can’t swim, but that doesn’t stop camp counselor Alex Mason from leaving him out on a raft in the middle of the lake in a fit of rage. Alex only meant to scare the kid, teach him a lesson. He didn’t mean to forget about him. But now Joey is gone… and his body is never found.
More than twenty years later, Alex is a success. The proof is there for anyone to see, in the millions of dollars he makes, his lavish house, his beautiful wife and daughters. And no one knows what happened that summer at camp. At least, no one should know. But it looks like Joey Proctor may be back to take his revenge…
Who will be next?
It doesn’t take long for a little boy to disappear. Joey Proctor can’t swim, but that doesn’t stop camp counselor Alex Mason from leaving him out on a raft in the middle of the lake in a fit of rage. Alex only meant to scare the kid, teach him a lesson. He didn’t mean to forget about him. But now Joey is gone… and his body is never found.
More than twenty years later, Alex is a success. The proof is there for anyone to see, in the millions of dollars he makes, his lavish house, his beautiful wife and daughters. And no one knows what happened that summer at camp. At least, no one should know. But it looks like Joey Proctor may be back to take his revenge…
My musings:
I just love it when a thriller totally takes me by surprise,
and The Drowning drew me in straight away with its dual timeline that introduced
what was to be a multi-layered, irresistible mystery. 21 years ago, eight-year-old
Joey Proctor disappeared without a trace from summer camp. Some of the other
boys are convinced he has fallen victim to urban legend John Otis, the evil man
who is rumoured to have been behind the disappearance of several boys in these
very woods. The police, on the other hand, believe that Joey may have wandered
off into the forest, perhaps distressed about his parents’ marital problems.
Only one person knows the truth – cocky swimming instructor Alex Mason, who
left the boy behind on a swimming raft in the middle of the lake that afternoon
to teach him a lesson and promptly forgot about him. But Alex is not about to
tell the truth and destroy his own future for the sake of a simple “mistake”. So
life goes on without Joey, even though for some it will never be the same again.
The other boys grow up, Alex grows older and richer, and soon the news story is
replaced by other headlines. Twenty years on, Alex has all but forgotten about
that long ago summer as he is basking in his success as a property developer,
living in a mansion with his pretty wife and two young daughters. Life has
treated him well. Until the day things start to go wrong for him – and he
receives a sinister message from Joey. But Joey is dead – or isn’t he?
J.P. Smith has taken a risk by starring a very unlikeable
character as the main protagonist in his novel, but he managed to totally pull this
off for me. Whilst I disliked Alex intensely – not only for what he has done,
but for his arrogance and lack of remorse – he always maintained a small degree
of humanity that made a tiny part of my heart sympathetic to his plight. Ok,
perhaps not overly sympathetic, but curious in how this would play out. Those
interested in seeing karma come back to haunt the guilty will get some
satisfaction out of the events that follow. And of course there is the mystery
of the cold case, the missing boy, that totally hooked me.
Smith writes well, and both timelines played out seamlessly
in my mind’s eye. I loved the constant thread of danger and suspense that overshadowed
the events in both past and present, and the inclusion of the urban legend was
a great touch. There is nothing quite like a John Otis to awaken our primal
fears of the monster coming in the night to take us away. Do we ever really
grow out of that? Everyone who has ever been on a school camp will be able to
recall the goosebumps as someone told a ghost story in the night. Then there
was the butterfly effect Joey’s death had on the lives he touched, ultimately
spinning out of control as the timelines collide. And if that was not enough,
there is that extra contemporary touch of including a filmmaker interested in
Joey’s story for a true-crime documentary, and a tireless detective
investigating the cold case. It now had all the elements I love in a thriller –
thank you very much!
The Drowning was one of those books that immediately drew me
in and made me read late into the night to find out the answers. It’s not easy these
days to find a thriller that stands out from the rest, but this one is so
cleverly plotted that it definitely fell into that category for me. A well constructed,
compelling read!
Thank
you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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