The Sea of Lost Girls
In the tradition of Daphne du Maurier, Shari Lapena, and Michelle Richmond comes a new thriller from the bestselling author of The Lake of Dead Languages—a twisty, harrowing story set at a prestigious prep school in which one woman’s carefully hidden past might destroy her future.
Tess has worked hard to keep her past buried, where it belongs. Now she’s the wife to a respected professor at an elite boarding school, where she also teaches. Her seventeen-year-old son, Rudy, whose dark moods and complicated behavior she’s long worried about, seems to be thriving: he has a lead role in the school play and a smart and ambitious girlfriend. Tess tries not to think about the mistakes she made eighteen years ago, and mostly, she succeeds.
And then one more morning she gets a text at 2:50 AM: it’s Rudy, asking for help. When Tess picks him up she finds him drenched and shivering, with a dark stain on his sweatshirt. Four hours later, Tess gets a phone call from the Haywood school headmistress: Lila Zeller, Rudy’s girlfriend, has been found dead on the beach, not far from where Tess found Rudy just hours before.
As the investigation into Lila’s death escalates, Tess finds her family attacked on all sides. What first seemed like a tragic accidental death is turning into something far more sinister, and not only is Tess’s son a suspect but her husband is a person of interest too. But Lila’s death isn’t the first blemish on Haywood’s record, and the more Tess learns about Haywood’s fabled history, the more she realizes that not all skeletons will stay safely locked in the closet.
Title: The Sea of Lost Girls
Author: Carol Goodman
Genre: Mystery / Thriller
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Books
Publishing Date: 03/03/20
Language: English
ISBN: 0062979639
ISBN-13: 9780062979636
My Review
The elite boarding school of Haywood in coastal Maine is shrouded in a mystery of disappearing girls over decades. Every time someone is trailing too close into finding out the truth about a possible connection, someone new disappears, so with Lila Zeller.
Girlfriend of her son Rudy, and gifted writer student, Tessa has enjoyed Lila very much around her son and as a student in her class. Leaving her own tumultuous past behind, Tessa remarried Professor Harmon from the school and has worked very hard to keep her moody son stable and their history a secret.
When the phone rings in the middle of the night and Rudy asks Tess to come and get him, she finds him unraveled, wet and bloody by a cliffside. Texts from his cell phone reveal, he has been in a fight with Lila. Naturally, Tess wants to care for her son, get him dry, fed and into a safe space, but when the police show up the next morning about Lila's death, the two of them are floored.
Teachers and students are asked to gather for a police questioning and the plot starts to thicken, adding twists and turns to trail the investigation as well as mislead the reader in all sorts of directions. Was Lila about to expose a big secret of the school? Is this why she died? And how about those trips she took with Tessa's husband to study historic documents? Did they have an affair? Why has she not turned in her paper to the literary prize committee? Is someone sabotaging her?
So many questions!
Oh, it is a twisty one to read, with a lot of unease. Tess's former life included an abusive relationship with Rudy's father, and it keeps creeping up. If one has sensitivity towards these things it can trigger some anxiety, it did for me, anyway. I haven't read one like this in a long time.
This novel reads fast-paced and has all the right elements that a thriller/mystery needs, albeit the ending fell just a little flat for me after an incredible take-off. Is it still worth a read? Definitely :)
