The Drowning Girls by Veronica Lando

Publisher's Synopsis

Cast a stone. Aim true. Let her sink.

Nate can't believe he's dragged himself up to this backwater town. Port Flinders would have fallen off the map years ago, except for one thing. Tourists flock to its mangrove-lined shores for the annual Drowning Girl festival: sacrifice a girl at sea, and the fishing hauls that keep the town afloat will prosper. Or don't and the whole town will sink.

But it's just a legend, a gimmick. Everybody knows that.

As fireworks light up the night sky, a woman's body is pulled from the inky waters of the gulf. Shock waves threaten to tear Port Flinders apart when she's identified as Kelsey Webb: a local teenager thought dead for twenty-five years.

As Nate tries to find the truth about what happened to Kelsey, he uncovers a string of deadly accidents over the decades. All women. All drowned. And always during the festival.

In his search for answers, the legend of the Drowning Girl begins to take hold of Nate, weaving its way into his head and threatening to pull him under, and he begins to question which sacrifices are truly necessary.

My Review of The Drowning Girls by Veronica Lando

Set in the small coastal (fictional) town of Port Flinders in Far North Queensland, The Drowning Girls provides us with a strange tradition, a community utterly invested in its success and a mysterious death.

We pick up the story as Nate Bass, a teacher who has been assigned the job of taking up a teaching job in the tiny community, hits town. The town is known for its Drowning Girl tradition of offering the statue of a woman up to the ocean each year, setting her afloat and then tossing stones on her body until she sinks. The legend is that the offering will result in a bumper fishing season in the coming months.

During a night of celebration the body of a real woman is discovered in the water. She’s pulled out but can’t be revived. It becomes apparent the dead woman was thought to have drowned in the same waters 25 years earlier.

It’s at this point that the story very much becomes a slow-burn mystery as we begin to switch back and forth between the present and the events of 25 years earlier. Through this process it begins to become apparent that we’re uncovering facts about, not one but two deaths, each somehow connected to this unusual drowning girl tradition.

From the sprawling ensemble of characters to the sense that the town is slowly in decay, there is an eeriness about the town of Port Flinders. It’s atmospheric to the point of gothic with a sort of brooding darkness surrounding the place, quite a chilling feeling, actually.

There are some similarities between this story and Lando’s first novel, The Whispering. Both are set in small North Queensland towns, both involve someone returning to a small town after being away for years, both returning men are haunted by events that took place in the town in their pasts and both feverishly try to solve a murder. And both are intricately plotted mysteries that uncover secrets that are assiduously held and jaw-dropping in their revelation.

I did have a couple of problems with The Drowning Girl and the first was the clumsy way in which the unreliable narrator device was used. I felt it was done in such a way that we were essentially being lied to through the first third of the book. My other problem was with the pacing of the story. At times I found myself disengaging with the story as the narrative drifted along to no conceivable goal.

Fortunately, a nice save is executed with an ending that left me somewhat gobsmacked with surprise. The ethereal image of the dark haired woman in the white shift drifting in the dark waters of Port Flinders will stay with me for some time.