The Drowning Girls by Lisa Regan

Today is the release of book 13 in the bestselling Josie Quinn Series! The Drowning Girls is another thrill ride for the fans of this series. One of their own is accused. One of their own is missing. And Josie is in a fight against time to save them both!

In the thin glow of moonlight, a mess of auburn curls gleams against the rocks. Hands bound, the girl’s fragile body is limp and still. Seconds later, a wall of raging white water crashes down, swallowing her whole…

A knock on the door late in the evening can only mean trouble for Detective Josie Quinn, but fear chokes her at the news that the one of her own team is missing. No one has seen Denton PD’s beautiful Press Liaison Amber for days. Sweet-natured and totally dedicated to the job, she’d never let her colleagues down. A message scrawled on the frosted windscreen of Amber’s car leads Josie to a nearby dam. But the body they pull from the water is not Amber…

Josie won’t sleep until she finds a name for the innocent girl left to drown, and the meaning of the numbers scribbled in a tattered pink diary found on Amber’s desk. But when the trail leads her to a twisted truth about Amber’s family, Josie wonders if anyone really knew her at all?

Her team crumbling around her, Josie must stay strong and focused to get the job done. But as prime suspects start going missing, and rumors of an argument the night Amber disappeared surface, could one of her own staff be to blame?
​
Finding Amber alive is Josie’s only chance of knowing the truth and stopping a dangerous killer in their tracks. But as a blizzard closes in, how many more precious lives will be snatched before she can

Amazon

Google

Apple

Kobo

REVIEW:
It’s always an honor and a challenge to be one of the first to read and review a Lisa Regan novel. Part of me wants to gush until the whole story is told and the other part of me wants to keep it all a secret so the book unfolds in its precise pacing that Lisa has perfected. Instead, I always find myself walking a tight rope between the two. We are 13 books deep with Josie Quinn now, but don’t get comfortable, because just when you think you know what to expect out of Lisa’s ‘go against the rules detective,’ she’ll throw you for a loop.

Life has changed Josie Quinn. She’s seeing family from a different perspective now that her beloved grandmother, Lisette, has passed away and left her to deal with life without her. When the book opens, Josie is about to sit down with the family she has left to watch her sister’s latest special reporting. A knock on the door changes her plans instantly when she discovers Detective Finn Mettner on her doorstep, in need of help. His girlfriend, and the PR liaison for the Denton PD, was missing, and Mett didn’t have a good feeling about it.

Once Josie saw the scene, she didn’t have a good feeling about it either, but she barely had time to finish reaming Mett out for breaking the rules of a basic investigation because he knew the victim (A bit like the pot meeting the kettle, if you ask me, so I giggled when Josie thought the same thing) when they instantly found themselves embroiled in a whole new murder investigation.
It was two weeks before Christmas and Josie had four detectives detecting, three men a lyin’, two women missing, and a preacher with a very sketchy past. When Mett gets placed on suspension during the investigation, Josie is down a detective, and forced to look at one of her own as the perpetrator of violent murders and kidnapped women. Do not even get me started on how I felt when she took off the kid’s gloves on poor little Detective Mettner!

In true Josie Quinn fashion, she laid out the pieces of her puzzle and started to fit them around the edges to build a frame, but the pieces didn’t want to go together logically. That told her one thing; their logic was wrong. The tangled web of lies she had to unravel from the Watts family encompassed years’ worth of relationships that touched multiple families and multiple lives.
What wasn’t in true Josie Quinn fashion? Her personal life. She was tough as nails at work, but softer with her family. She was learning to accept the things that had happened to her and the wonderful people who had been part of her life along the way to offer her love, and the people she had in her life now that loved her unconditionally. When she let those emotions filter into her work, she was able to move mountains for Mett and the woman he loves.

This time, while plenty of people tried to kill Josie in a myriad of different ways, Lisa tips us on our ear and throws us a curveball in this book that shows us how much Josie has changed in the eight months since Lisette left her life.

As always, it is nearly impossible to review a Josie Quinn novel without spoilers, but I will say The Drowning Girls shows us that our favorite characters are at their best when they grow and change over the course of the series. Kudos to Ms. Regan for finding her voice again even when she thought it had disappeared for good and for doing it in a way that kept us enthralled to the very last page. If I had to sum up The Drowning Girls in a sentence, I would say: Josie is learning to live with both the grief and the joy in her life as is the woman behind the pen.

Goodreads