First published 2021
Jax is a social worker who has learned to manage her sister Lexie from a distance. When nine calls go unanswered and Lexie turns up dead in the swimming pool at their grandmother's Vermont estate, Jax drives north to pack up her sister's things. What she finds instead is a stack of research. Lexie had been pulling on a thread that runs back to 1929, when a woman named Ethel Monroe checked into a luxury hotel built around a natural spring. The locals said the water granted wishes. Ethel believed them. She paid for that belief in ways she never anticipated. Jax keeps reading. The names keep coming. Victim after victim, decade after decade, all of them connected to the same pool on the same land her family has owned for years. The water does not forget a debt, and the more Jax learns about her family's history with the spring, the clearer it becomes that Lexie was not the first to drown there and may not be the last. Jax has to decide how far she is willing to go to understand what her family bought into, and what it will cost her to walk away.
Genres: mystery, horror, contemporary, thriller, psychological-thriller, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, eerie, haunting, introspective, suspenseful
Tropes: family-curse, investigation-into-history, past-haunting-present, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vermont, Grandmother's Estate, Natural Spring, Luxury Hotel
Period: 1929, Contemporary
319 pages · Paperback · Gallery/Scout Press
Content warnings: death, suicide