Welcome to Ravendale, Cumbria, where twenty years ago, on her seventeenth birthday, Katy Merrick vanished.

Nobody could agree on what had happened.

Some said she ran. Others said she was taken. Some said the lake chose her – and that nothing could have stood in its way.

For twenty years, the village has lived with the not knowing.

Until the lake sent her body back.

Now, forensic pathologist Rose Huxley has returned to the village she swore she’d never set foot in again. Katy was her half-sister. The investigation needs her. And the truth, Rose tells herself, is the only thing she’s here for.

But Ravendale has a long memory. And so does the lake.

In the weeks before she died, Katy had become convinced that something beyond the living world was coming for her. Rose has spent twenty years telling herself it was delusion. The desperate logic of a troubled girl.

Now, Rose is starting to wonder if she was wrong…

The Drowning Girl is a gripping new mystery about guilt, grief, and the dangerous gap between what we remember and what really happened