Book Review: The Woman Underwater

The Woman Underwater by Penny Goetjen is another mystery thriller I was sent to review months ago and just got around to reading. I have mixed feelings about the book so keep reading for my review!

The book follows Victoria Sands. 7 years ago her husband, a history teacher at a prestigious New England boarding school, went missing. He was going from Connecticut, where they lived in faculty housing, to New York City with students and the headmaster, Ben Martin. But he was missing from the field trip for half the time and it was chalked up to him getting too absorbed in his research at the museum. When it came time to board the buses and head back to Connecticut, he was nowhere to be found. His disappearance without a trace has haunted Victoria for the past 7 years and she has not been able to truly move on despite dating.

Even though her friends all say she needs to move on, there’s no way her husband could still be alive after all this time, she refuses to give up. Victoria starts having nightmares and other little things start to turn up or happen that has Victoria digging and hoping to find out what really happened to her husband and hopefully either find him or get some closure once and for all.

While I found the story interesting and I kept reading because I wanted to find out what really happened – I felt the story fell a bit flat. There were no real clues left along the way for readers to really make guesses. Not even misleading clues. Most of the characters seemed sketchy or like they were unreliable and hiding something but then nothing came of it, not even explanations to clear up why those characters were acting weird. I actually was getting annoyed for Victoria when people kept making decisions for her without her consent and telling her what to do.

I still gave the book 3 stars on GoodReads because despite the things I didn’t care for in the book, I couldn’t stop reading because I wanted to see what the ending would be.