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SWEET WATER by Cara Reinard

SWEET WATER

by Cara Reinard

Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2493-8
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Reinard’s novel plunges a perfect family into a horrible situation whose horrors steadily deepen.

Having attended Carnegie Mellon University on a scholarship because her father, Victor Denning, was head of campus maintenance there, Sarah Ellsworth has landed in the lap of luxury, married to the younger son of wealthy, well-connected William Ellsworth and installed in the house she’s called Stonehenge ever since she and her father used to drive past it years ago. A phone call from her teenage son, Finn, threatens to bring it all crashing down. Following Finn’s iPhone location when he’s unable to tell them where he is, Sarah and Martin Ellsworth, the whiz-kid CEO of a robotics startup, find him in the woods along with the body of Yazmin Veltri, his girlfriend from the other side of the tracks. She’s been bashed to death, and Finn is the overwhelmingly obvious suspect. The Ellsworths swiftly close ranks to contain the threat, cleaning up the evidence implicating Finn and rehearsing him in a story that contains just enough facts to be plausible. Sarah, at once desperate to protect her son and sickened that she’s falling in so easily with the coverup planned by her husband’s family, is still further distressed by a meeting with Yazmin’s mother, Alisha, who demands the return of a tell-all journal her daughter had been keeping. Martin’s cousin Alton Pembroke, the sheriff in charge of the case, says he doesn’t have it. Sarah’s search leads her to Yazmin’s music teacher, Joshua Louden, who just happens to be Sarah’s first love from the days when his own family lived in Stonehenge.

An unsparing account of “rich people problems” that goes on forever, like all the best nightmares.