My Review with Spoilers of The Lake of Lost Girls discusses that I’m a little over Books with Podcast Elements. While The Lake of Lost Girls had some flaws (it’s really out-there!) I still found it fun and enjoyable. Will you love it? Let’s discuss! Includes a plot summary and protected spoilers.
Jen’s Quick Take on The Lake of Lost Girls
- Yes, another book with Podcast Elements
- And a book with a SPOOKY lake setting
- Past-present timeline, alternating from the present to the late 1990s
- College aged characters, which gives it a bit of a younger feel
- The podcast elements added little to the story (in my opinion)
- My reader friends say the audiobook is really good
- Published on November 5, 2024 by Crooked Lane. 320 pages. Thanks to the publisher for the advance copy for review.
Review with Spoilers of The Lake of Lost Girls
The mystery at the center of The Lake of Lost Girls is about the disappearance of four female students from a North Carolina college in the late 1990s.
The story alternates between Jessica, one of the missing girls, in 1998, and Jessica’s younger sister Lindsay in the present. Lindsey was a young child when her sister vanished and now manages a hotel.
The book follows a very familiar plotline used by most Suspense Books With Podcast Elements which is that a podcast starts a deep (in this case, not really) dive into the missing persons cases.
To me, the most interesting part of the book is how many clues it dropped. I’m used to books that keep you guessing until the end. I think the book did present a number of alternate scenarios, but to me the clues (I’ll discuss them below) pointed in only one direction.
Spoilers and Plot Summary for The Lake of Lost Girls
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First, the podcast. Unfortunately, the podcast in this book was the kind I hate: a couple of people just having rambling conversations.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Talk to me in the comments and spoilers are fine!!
“The book then dropped a MAJOR CLUE: there was a terrible smell in Jessica and Lindsay’s garage. Terrible. So terrible! I thought this must be a red herring, right???”
😂 For sure! But wait…the corpse has been there for 24 years? Because that’s bonkers.
Excellent point! I can’t remember if the smell was in the past or the present but I am going to check 🙂
Are we supposed to glean that Ben was SAing Jessica? Or that they were just creepily close? I can’t figure out what we are supposed to conclude. Also, was Jess really seeing Dr. Daniels or was she planning to meet up with him to kill him? If she was that mad at the other girls, I can’t picture her almost doing the same thing.
I also felt the book wasn’t clear about these things.I added a section to the end of the post discussing this. Your two questions are connected in some way, but I’m not entirely clear how.
We know that 1) Jess and her dad Ben had a disturbingly close relationship, 2) Jess knew Ben was sleeping with girls Jess’s age and she was clearly upset about it, 3) Jess then slept with Daniels and taunted her father about it.
But I’m not sure whether Ben was simply a cheater who loved Jess and was trying to protect her, or whether he was more directly responsible for her crimes by either abusing her and/or having a weird co-dependent relationship with her that made her jealous of his affairs to the point she became a killer.
I think Jess was just seeing Daniels to mess with her father, but I could be wrong about that.
Did Jessica‘s dad kill himself after killing her?
Hi Dot,
I didn’t see that in my copy. What made you think that? I’d love to discuss it!