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.

Welp…

She has done it again.

Man the twists never stop. I love this series and I really can’t get enough of visiting all the characters. Josie is such a badass and when one of their own finds themselves first under suspicion and making the wrong choices it is up to her to be the voice of reason. Also I’m going to say this again…I love, love, love Noah. This book is a great addition to the series!

Edit…

I would like to add that this book is an ode to grief. Josie’s grief still remains a living breathing entity. Almost as if you can reach into the book and touch it. And how she has changed in these months since Lisette’s death is really huge.

It’s a stunning glimpse also into the author’s grieving process since losing her father suddenly. I love this book for many reasons, most of which is the sheer determination and talent of this author.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Lisette that is so very special. And something that the character & the author must learn to do.

“You have to learn to live with them both, my dear. The grief and the joy.”