Book Review: Daughter of Mine by Megan Miranda

If you’re looking for a suspense/thriller with a foreboding setting, I recommend Megan Miranda’s new novel, Daughter of Mine.

Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls; The Perfect Stranger; The Last House Guest, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick; The Girl from Widow Hills; Such a Quiet Place; The Last to Vanish; and The Only Survivors. She has also written several books for young adults. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children.

Here’s a synopsis of the book:

When Mirror Lake’s longtime detective dies suddenly, his daughter Hazel Sharp is wary of returning to the town (and people) she left behind almost a decade earlier. But Hazel is not the only relic of the past to resurface: a drought is gripping the region, and as the water level in the lake drops, long-hidden secrets begin to emerge…including evidence that may finally explain what happened to Hazel’s mother, who disappeared when Hazel was a teenager.  

Miranda expertly unspools the tense loyalties within small towns, the secrets and loyalties buried among families, and the mysteries that lurk under the surface. As Hazel races to find out the truth about her family and those closest to her, she is hurtled onto a dangerous, claustrophobic rollercoaster that ramps up to a gripping (and unpredictable) conclusion.

Review:

Because the author lives near me in person and uses local settings as the inspiration for many of her stories, I’m always excited to see what she has up her sleeve next. Daughter of Mine, set against the mysterious backdrop of a lake community, does not disappoint. The novel is separated into four parts: Father, Mother, Daughter, and Sons.

The reader knows from the opening pages that there are fractures among Hazel’s family, including her two brothers and the best friend Jamie that married one of them. There’s older brother, Gage, who remains protective of Hazel, and Caden, who is holding a grudge towards Hazel for reasons unknown to the reader. In addition, the relationship between Hazel and Jamie seems strained.

When the book begins, Hazel, whose father Perry has recently passed away, is living out of town when she learns their father has left his lake house to her solely, and not her and his sons. She has no idea why he has done this, but it causes a deeper divide in the relationship with her brothers. Now in the business of buying and flipping homes, Hazel returns to help clean out the house and assess her next steps. She is surprised to learn her ex-boyfriend Nico, a high school teacher and scuba diver, who is a friend of her brother Caden, is also living nearby once again.

Miranda carefully unravels a tale of family secrets and mysteries as each chapter unfolds and the lake levels continue to drop—when the book opens during the month of May it has been 62 days without rain and by the end it has finally begun raining. A car has also been pulled out of the lake near her family home and Hazel has a sneaking suspicion she knows the owner. The lake levels continue to reveal other secrets that have long been buried. To add to the intrigue, there’s a mysterious letter Hazel’s mother left behind that she’s never been able to figure out.

There were several different storylines that kept me engaged as a reader—the cars surfacing from underneath the lake, the vandalism occurring in the area, the fact that someone seems to keep entering Hazel’s home when she’s not around, different people who go missing while Hazel is assessing the house, “citizen sleuths” who have arrived in Mirror Lake to try and unearth the mysteries beneath the water, Perry Holt’s attorney brother who still lives in town, and most of all, the truth about happened to Hazel’s mother all those years ago.

All the threads in the book unfold slowly amid a small-town shrouded in darkness and a home that might not be the fortress it appears to be. And there are members of the police department who also seem hesitant to ask too many questions about mysteries within the town’s families. The pacing of the book will keep you turning the pages until the very end.

Thank you to Marysue Ricci Books and NetGalley for the chance to read an advance copy of the book!