Book Review: Still Lake

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Still Lake     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
Anne Stuart
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Romantic Suspense
Mira, Jul 2002, $6.50, 384 pp.

Deciding she needed a change from her complex Manhattan lifestyle, advice newspaper columnist Sophie Davis relocates to Colby, Vermont where she plans to run an inn. The poor man’s Martha Stewart takes her seemingly senile mother and her raging hormonal teenage half sister with her.

To Sophie’s chagrin, as she wants no nearby neighbors, John Smith moves into a nearby cabin that has not been used in six years. John is actually Thomas Griffin who was convicted of murdering three teenage girls twenty years ago, but was freed five years later on a technicality. Thomas has come back to Colby to learn what really happened on that night in which he remembers nothing. As John and Sophie begin to fall in love, an eerily similar homicide similar to those of past occurs just two weeks before the grand opening of Stonegate Farm.

STILL LAKE is an exciting romantic suspense novel starring intriguing lead characters struggling with problems that leave both not welcoming love into their respective lives. Though Sophie is a bit too responsible, she represents the sandwich generation with troubles from her senior and her younger that surround her. Thomas is a wonderfully bewildered protagonist who does not know if he committed those murders. The support cast provides depth by enabling the audience to better understand what makes Thomas and Sophie tick as well as adding suspense to Anne Stuart’s fine contemporary tale.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner