Rating: 8.5/10
Daughters of the Lake is a story full of generations of lives, betrayal, magic, and a murder mystery. The story focuses around a multitude of people, but the modern-day protagonist is Kate Granger. Kate returns home to her parent's home following her husband's infidelity. While she's there, a woman and her baby wash up on the beach. What nobody understands is why nobody seems to know who the woman is, except for Kate. The woman looks like someone right out of the turn of the century, but she looks as though she just died. Kate doesn't know exactly why she feels as though she knows the woman, until she realizes that she's been dreaming of her. This story tells the story of the woman in the lake and the woman searching for her killer though the lens of many different time periods. Just when you think you know who did it, everything abruptly gets turned on its head.
I loved the story behind this, the way you learn about all of these character's lives through many different generations. Webb intricately weaves the narrations throughout in a way that makes the narration just flow. There are clear switches in point of view sometimes, but there is also subtle shifts from one character through another. For example, this happens when Kate is explaining the history of her great grandfather Harrison.
This isn't just any murder mystery though, this is a story chock full of heartbreak, secrets, some mysticism, and even some supernatural elements. It isn't overdone either. Most of the time, the ghosts are mentioned in passing by the author. You learn that, "Oh, the main character is doing this, but they didn't realize that the very dead person that they were discussing was there in the room with them." I quite liked it, it added intrigue and answers the little questions that we get sometimes. Questions like, "I wonder what this person would've thought about this." There is also this little side point regarding the women's mystical, almost magic connection to the lake. It was super interesting to learn about.
You get to learn about the lives of many people and theres even a love story intertwined between Addie and Jess in the past, and Kate and Nick in the present. It really is well done. My biggest problem with the book was the end, there was this whole unnecessary part with the angry ghost of Harrison's wife Celeste. It just felt forced in, I liked the way that the stories were just mentioning the ghosts before then. Having one start acting up for kind of no reason was just meh to me.
Overall, this was a great audiobook to listen to. I was able to listen to it on audible for free through Prime Reading and I don't regret it one bit. It kept me rapt the whole time, I was wondering what was going to happen next, what I was going to learn about, what secrets were going to come out. I did guess half of the big twist, I can't say what it was all I can say is that the killer caught me off guard. Webb did a great job of leading you away from the legitimate killer, at first you think, "really?" then you recognize that it does make perfect sense. If you have Amazon Prime, you can read the ebook and/or listen to it for free and I highly recommend that you do, I thought it was a great, under-appreciated work.