The Drowning Kind

Jax has stopped answering her sister's calls. The next one she gets is that Lexie has drowned in the pool at Sparrow Crest, their grandmother's estate in Vermont. Jax comes home for the funeral and finds the journal Lexie left behind, full of research into a family history nobody wanted to tell her.

The book runs on two timelines. In the present, Jax works through what her sister uncovered, while her aunt Diane fills in what the family has always known and never said aloud. Back in 1929, a newlywed named Ethel Monroe arrives at the grand hotel that once stood on the same grounds. Its spring, she learns, grants wishes. Ethel wants a child badly enough to make one.

Every wish the water grants, it charges for elsewhere. Jax starts counting the relatives that spring has already taken, decade by decade, and the two women's stories close in on each other. Ryan, an old friend back in town, turns out to be one of the few people still willing to talk about it.

It reads as a slow-building supernatural thriller, patient with its dread and content to let a family's silence do most of the damage. It was named a New York Times Best Thriller of the year it came out.