The Dark Lake
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3.9 • 14 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A tight-knit community is shocked by revelations from decades past in this "enthralling" (Associated Press) literary mystery that "will keep you racing toward the end" (Lisa Gardner).
The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama.
As much as Rosalind's life was a mystery to Gemma when they were students together, her death presents even more of a puzzle. What made Rosalind quit her teaching job in Sydney and return to her hometown? Why did she live in a small, run-down apartment when her father was one of the town's richest men? And despite her many admirers, did anyone in the town truly know her?
Rosalind's enigmas frustrate and obsess Gemma, who has her own dangerous secrets--an affair with her colleague and past tragedies that may not stay in the past. Brilliantly rendered, The Dark Lake has characters as compelling and mysteries as layered as the best thrillers from Gillian Flynn and Sophie Hannah.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Police work comes easily to Det. Sgt. Gemma Woodstock, the narrator of Australian author Bailey's stellar first novel and a rising star in her rural hometown of Smithson. It's the rest of Gemma's life that's problematic, and about to become precarious, with the discovery of Rose Ryan floating, Ophelialike, amid blood-red roses in the lake behind the high school where she taught English and drama. Though it has been a decade since Gemma and Rose graduated from that same institution, weeks after the suicide of Jacob, the boy they both wanted, the case opens the floodgates to secrets Gemma has struggled to repress. But as she and detective partner Felix with whom she's pursuing an affair that could torpedo both his marriage and her live-in relationship with her son's father discover, beautiful, brainy Rose had skeletons of her own. Bailey interweaves her sympathetic protagonist's past and present with uncommon assurance including letting readers in on a crucial revelation Gemma doesn't share creating a page-turner that's both tense and thought provoking.)
