Blog Tour & Review: The Sea of Lost Girls by Carol Goodman

Title: The Sea of Lost Girls

Author: Carol Goodman

Published: March 2020, William Morrow Paperbacks

Format: Paperback, 320 pages

Source: Publisher via TLC Booktours

Summary:

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.

My thoughts: This is the first book I’ve read by Carol Goodman but it certainly will not be the last. I was captivated from the first page and completely engaged all the way through. 

I love a good atmospheric novel and this one has it in spades. Set on the Maine coastland, it just amped up the tension and I found it to be effective here. On top of that, the boarding school with it’s legends and ghost stories that have been passed down through the generations just gave the story an extra layer of intrigue that kept me glued to the pages.

There is nothing I love more than misdirection in a mystery, and I felt that I was constantly second guessing myself here. I felt sure I knew who the killer was right from the start, but could it be that easy? And then the deeper we got into the story, I knew for sure I had the right suspect, only to be misled once again. I love a book that keeps me on my toes, making me really think about the clues I am given and this one sure did keep my mind busy, for sure!

This book is full of secrets, and as we all know, secrets have a way of coming out at some point. I loved that it was all told from Tess’s point of view – it’s a nice change from the many books that have multiple narrators. It goes back and forth in time from the present to the past, where we learn some integral bits of information that have some impact on what is going on in the present. 

I read the majority of this book in one sitting, as once I really got into the book, I had a hard time putting it down. It’s the type of book that gets under your skin as you become desperate to find out what is really going on. I love books like that and I definitely plan on seeing if Carol Goodman’s other books are just as addicting!

About the author: Carol Goodman is the critically acclaimed author of fourteen novels, including The Lake of Dead Languages and The Seduction of Water, which
won the 2003 Hammett Prize. Her books have been translated into sixteen
languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family, and teaches
writing and literature at the New School and SUNY New Paltz.

Author links:  Website  | Twitter  | Facebook  | Instagram 

Purchase Links:   HarperCollins | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

 

Be sure to check out all the other stops on the blog tour and follow the tour on Twitter (hashtags:  #TLCBookTours & #theseaoflostgirls).