Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Book Review: DROWNING WITH OTHERS by Linda Keir

Synopsis

They have the perfect marriage. Did one of them kill to get it?

Prep school sweethearts Ian and Andi Copeland are envied by everyone they know. They have successful businesses, a beautiful house in St. Louis, and their eldest daughter, Cassidy, is following in their footsteps by attending prestigious Glenlake Academy. Then, a submerged car is dredged from the bottom of a swimming hole near the campus. So are the remains of a former writer-in-residence who vanished twenty years ago—during Ian and Andi’s senior year.

When Cassidy’s journalism class begins investigating the death, Ian and Andi’s high school secrets rise to the surface. Each has a troubled link to the man whose arrival and sudden disappearance once set the school on edge. And each had a reason to want him gone. As Cassidy unwittingly edges closer to the truth, unspoken words, locked away for decades, will force Ian and Andi to question what they really know—about themselves, about the past, and about a marriage built on a murderous lie.



Review

An interesting read, the author uses the journals written by Andi and Ian when they were students, and when the visiting writer/scholar, and "bad boy poet" Dallas Walker, mysteriously disappeared. This is juxtaposed with Cassidy's experience in the same situation, a student taking the seminar with the latest visiting writer/scholar. In Cassidy's case, instead of a poet, Wayne Kelly is an investigative reporter and the discovery of Walker's body provides a convenient assignment in investigative reporting for the class.

Not a cozy and not written as a typical suspense or mystery, the draw is the characters and the secrets that were kept for 20 years. And for Ian and Andi, the reader gets to know them as they are now, happily married, successful, and living the dream, as well as how they were as high school students and the effect one teacher could have on them and their relationship. As readers, we get to see the growth and some of the residual angst from their high school years. A book worth reading.  Very glad I was able to read this as part of the Kindle First selection.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds deep.. literally, cool share. Interesting character development.

    ReplyDelete