An Entertainment Weekly New and Notable selection
A Refinery29 Best Book of November
A Liz & Lisa Best Book of the Month
“Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Well-delineated characters and a suspenseful plot make this a winner.” —Publishers Weekly
“Daughters of the Lake has everything you could want in a spellbinding read: unexpected family secrets, ghosts, tragic love stories, intertwined fates.” —Refinery29
“…Perfect for anyone who loves a good ghost story that bleeds into the present day.” —Health
“Daughters of the Lake is gothic to its core, a story of ghostly revenge, of wronged parties setting history right.” —Star Tribune
“Daughters of the Lake provides an immersive reading experience to those who love ghostly mysteries, time travel, and lovely descriptions.” —New York Journal of Books
“Daughters of the Lake is an alchemical blend of romance, intrigue, ancestry, and the supernatural.” —Bookreporter
“Eerie, atmospheric, and mesmerizing.” —Novelgossip
“…Haunting and heartbreaking…A masterful work of suspense…” —Midwest Book Review
“In Wendy Webb’s entrancing Daughters of the Lake, dreams open a door between the dead and the living, a lake spirit calls to a family of gifted women, and a century-old murder is solved under the cover of fog. This northern gothic gem is everything that is delicious, spooky, and impossible to put down.” —Emily Carpenter, author of Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, The Weight of Lies, and Every Single Secret
“The tentacles of the past reach out to threaten Kate Granger in this atmospheric tale, set on the shores of Lake Superior. Filled with all the intrigue of old houses and their long-buried secrets, this gothic tale will make you shiver.” —Elizabeth Hall, bestselling author of Miramont’s Ghost
“Wendy Webb’s deftly woven tale hits all the right notes. A lost legacy of lake spirits, restless ghostly figures, and a past shrouded in fog and regret blend in delicious harmony in Daughters of the Lake. The queen of northern gothic does it again with this quintessential ghost story [that’s] every bit as compelling and evocative as her fans have come to expect.” —Eliza Maxwell, bestselling author of The Unremembered Girl
09/03/2018
Kate Granger, the heroine of this well-crafted supernatural thriller from Webb (The Vanishing), retreats to her childhood home on Lake Superior after discovering that her husband has been unfaithful. When Kate’s father finds the body of a woman holding an infant’s corpse on the shore of the lake, Kate is upset because she realizes she has been dreaming for weeks about this unknown woman. As she continues to dream about the dead woman, Kate experiences the events in her dreams as if they were happening to her. In her search for the woman’s identity, Kate unearths a photo of her picnicking with her great-grandparents more than a hundred years before. From newspaper articles of that period, Kate learns the woman is Addie Cassatt, who mysteriously disappeared. Chapters divulging Addie’s tragic love story alternate with events in Kate’s personal life as she seeks to determine why her life is somehow related to Addie’s and why Addie surfaced from the past. Well-delineated characters and a suspenseful plot make this a winner. Agent: Jennifer Weltz, Jean Naggar Literary. (Nov.)
2018-08-21
A body washed up on the shore of Lake Superior moves a family to rewrite its 100-year history in Webb's (The Vanishing, 2014, etc.) new novel, set equally in each era.
Lake Superior, which has always been known for its legends, one day reveals a new mystery when an unidentified body clutching an equally dead baby washes up on the shore near Kate Granger's family home. Kate, who's come to town only recently in an attempt to recover from a breakup with her philandering husband, is captivated by the young woman, who's been appearing to her in dreams. Police know the family too well to suspect Kate was involved in the crime, and she's allowed to travel within the area to stay with her cousin Simon at the Harrison's House, a stately former family home the unerringly nice Simon inherited and that he and his partner, Jonathan, have revamped into a B&B. Interspersed with chapters about Kate's search for the identity of the body is the story of Great Bay in 1889 and the early life of Addie Cassatt and her friend Jess Stewart. Addie's story sounds almost like a fable, from her birth in a lake that seems to love her to her first meeting with Jess, a boy who seems fated to be always by her side. Things grow more complicated when Jess goes away to college and begins to wonder about life beyond his small town and to ask whether Addie can be the woman he needs to help him achieve his professional dreams. As Addie learns about the limits of love, Kate learns that love may return when she's introduced to Nick, a police officer willing to invest as much time in identifying the body as Kate is. With the support of Simon and Nick, Kate tries to learn from her dreams and believe the impossible, even if it means connecting the body to a centuries-old mystery entangled with Kate and Simon's own family history.
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.
