"Three Drowned Girls" by Emily Shiner is an absolutely gripping and unputdownable crime thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

The story follows Detective Freya Sinclair, who returns to her hometown of Fawn Lake after five years away. As the daughter of serial killers, Freya faces hostility and suspicion from the tight-knit community she swore to protect. But when the body of a young girl is found in the river, Freya is determined to prove herself and bring the killer to justice.

Shiner masterfully weaves together a complex and suspenseful plot, filled with twists and turns that will leave readers guessing until the very end. From the moment the first body is discovered, the tension builds steadily, keeping you hooked with every page.

One of the strengths of this book is its well-developed characters. Freya is a compelling protagonist, haunted by her past but determined to make amends. As she delves deeper into the investigation, she faces obstacles and challenges that test her resolve and push her to her limits.

The supporting cast is equally compelling, from Freya's estranged family to the residents of Fawn Lake, each with their own secrets and motivations. Shiner does an excellent job of keeping readers guessing about the identity of the killer, throwing in red herrings and false leads that add to the suspense.

But perhaps the most chilling aspect of the book is its exploration of the darker side of human nature. As Freya uncovers the truth behind the murders, she is forced to confront the evil that lurks beneath the surface of her seemingly idyllic hometown.

Overall, "Three Drowned Girls" is a riveting and atmospheric thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end. With its well-drawn characters, twisty plot, and tense atmosphere, it's a must-read for fans of the genre. Emily Shiner has crafted a truly unforgettable tale of suspense and intrigue that will stay with you long after you've turned the final page.

Thanks to @bookouture for having me on this tour.

This is the first book in the Detective Freya Sinclair series. We follow Freya as she moves back to her hometown as a detective, having been shunned due to her parents' horrific acts. I have really enjoyed the quick pace of this book, and the writing style is nice and easy to follow. I couldn't put this book down as I read. I was creeped out by the ongoing events, and my heartstrings were pulled for those young girls who had gone missing. This book makes you suspicious of everyone involved in the questioning of the disappearing girls. Within all the darkness, there was a tiny hint of romance between Freya and Lance, although the circumstances only helped lighten the mood. The ending shocked me a bit, and I felt jaded and heartbroken. We also have a hint of what's to come in the next book, which I can't wait to read.

#threedrownedgirls #booksofinsta #books #detective

Three Drowned Girls
by Emily Shiner
Pub Date: April 22, 2024
Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest opinion.
Two drowned girls. One daughter still missing. Can Freya save Isa before she becomes the third victim? Or has the killer already set their sights on Freya next?

The first in a new, totally gripping serial-killer thriller series by Amazon bestselling author Emily Shiner. Fans of Melinda Leigh, Mary Stone and Elle Gray won’t be able to put this down!
This slightly dark police procedural is driven equally by a fascinating main character named Captain Freya Sinclair with a complicated backstory, and an intricately woven and shocking plot. I loved the distinctive secondary characters including her fellow detectives Candy and Brad and also Esther, the woman who took her in as a teen when her parents abandoned her. I don't want to give away any of the plotting, but it's twisted and disturbing with red herrings a bound. A great read for fans of crime fiction and psychological thrillers.

For this was just an ok read. When I read a book I need to feel or connect to it. I didn’t love or hate anyone in this book. I will say I wanted to know who the killer was. But usually I am racing to the end because I’m so invested. Unfortunately for this book I just wanted to be done to start a different book. The main character just didn’t bring any zip for me. And honestly I don’t even need to like the main character. I just need to be invested and it just was not there.

Three Drowned Girls by Emily Shiner is a new series featuring Captain Freya Sinclair as she returns to her hometown that holds a lot of bad memories. She is thrust into an investigation focused on discovery of a dead girl and all that follows.
The storyline was good. Great suspense, great characters, good twists. I did find it to be repetitive at times and I felt the pace could have been a tad faster. It had a lot of chapters and I felt it could have been shorter and still done what it needed to do.
I have read several Emily Shiner books and will continue reading this series as it becomes available.
Overall, I think it was good not spectacular. I would recommend however.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this arc.

Another one I could not put down and devoured in one sitting. I absolutely recommend this book. Be ready for an afternoon or evening of completely neglecting any chores as this one will have you hooked within the first chapter. I live for books that leave me speechless and this book did just that.

Three Drowned Girls by Emily Shiner is a good crime thriller featuring a new detective, Freya Sinclair. After five years away from her hometown of Fawn Lake, Detective Freya Sinclair isn’t expecting a warm welcome from the people she’s sworn to protect. She became a detective to bring serial killers like her parents to justice, but the tight-knit North Carolinian community can’t see past her twisted roots.

Minutes after returning home, the body of a dark-haired young girl is pulled from the river. Freya is determined to identify the child and finally prove herself, but before Freya even has a chance to search through missing persons, another girl is reported missing.

The story started off well, but then did get a bit tedious and was slow and repetitive in parts. There were many repetitive gestures and things the characters did, such as "hit the gas pedal...eat up the road"..."she ate up the interstate"..."she pressed down harder on the gas", it just got to be too much when reading.

Overall, the story was entertaining, and it had a good ending.

It was nice to get involved with a new crime drama and new characters. I really liked Candy Ellinger, an officer in Fawn Lake, and Briseyda Hernandez, the lead paramedic.

I will check out more books in this series and by this author. I would recommend this book.

#ThreeDrownedGirls #NetGalley @bookouture

This was such a wonderful new series
We return home with Freya, and she is immediately thrust into an investigation, she’s back in a hometown as the new chief

This book I could not put down
I really enjoyed it and I am sure there’s much more to Freya that will be revealed in upcoming books

Fraya Sinclair comes back to her hometown to face her past and start her job as captain on the police force-- and on her starting day - dead little girl is found-- starting a spiral of situations in the town.

I devoured this book ! -- finished it in one day - Fraya is a great character and very likeable and the story was also fast paced, with red herrings while also building up the secondary characters you felt like you were building relationships with many of the characters --I didn`t want to leave these characters and was happy to see another book in the series is coming out as well.

The book overall was engaging with good character development and keeps you wanting more.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for this ARC. This is my honest review.

Did anyone else feel super anxious reading this? Anxiety inducing for all the rushing around and in and out of the car and forever go go go. The mystery has faded, the allusions to her parents and the town itself, unremarkable..but all that constant energy, unforgettable.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

Three Drowned Girls is about Freya Sinclair and how she returns to her hometown to be a detective but then she gets wrapped up in a case of drowning girls which happens in a North Carolina community. This was my first time reading this author and I can not wait to read more of her books. This one was a dark and suspenseful tale that had me turning pages till the very end which I can not wait to read the next book in this series. The book was well written, engaging, gritty and overall the author did an amazing job. I highly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend this one to other readers especially to any reader who loves a good suspenseful book. Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for this ARC read in exchange of my honest review of Three Drowned Girls.

This slightly dark police procedural is driven equally by a fascinating main character named Captain Freya Sinclair with a complicated backstory, and an intricately woven and shocking plot. I loved the distinctive secondary characters including her fellow detectives Candy and Brad and also Esther, the woman who took her in as a teen when her parents abandoned her. I don't want to give away any of the plotting, but it's twisted and disturbing with red herrings a bound. A great read for fans of crime fiction and psychological thrillers.

Intense, riveting, emotional, and totally gripping! Horror of the past and present just won't let go as the police investigate murdered and missing young girls, in a town that won't forget the past. Tense investigation with a solid team - a must for mystery fans.

Freya Sinclair ran from her hometown of Fawn Lake after she had to arrest her parents for being serial killers. Now, five years later, Freya is back - and not a moment too soon. A young girl was found floating in an area river, clothed in a white dress. Freya, and her newly assembled team, are having a hard time identifying the little girl, as none have been reported missing. And, when they go to the school, they know there's something hinky going on there. The team discovers more girls may be missing than they initially thought, so they're on high alert and focused on solving this case. In addition, Freya is trying to readjust to being home with the help of the most excellent supporting character, Esther. Not much is said about Freya's past with her parents - so I'm super excited to read more in this series! Thank you to Bookouture for an advanced reader of this book. The opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC**

Freya Sinclair returns to her hometown as the new chief. When a young girls body is found in the water, Freya sets out to catch the killer before they can claim another victim. There are a few frustrating parts where you want to shake the characters but I enjoyed Freya and Candy and am looking forward to the next books in the series.

I'm hoping we get more about Freya's back story and her parents in the next novel.

This is a fair start to a new series, with good plotting and characterisation, although I would have liked a bit more detail of Freya's past life. She makes for an interesting character and works well with her small team. The language became a bit repetitive at times, which is quite frustrating and the pace was too slow. The premise of the plotting drew me in but left me feeling a bit disappointed with the ending, sadly. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

Overall, this one was a VERY interesting thriller. It involves kids and by the title you will have a clue to that. It seemed very slow at parts where nothing seemed to be happening or getting solved. There are a lot of clues to what was going to happen but the ending was a little surprising but there are enough clues to see the reasoning behind this certain group's beliefs.

I actually wish I could read a book about the detective's family and what happened years prior. Honestly, I wish we got a little bit of both stories so it made the book a little faster pace. We got vague information but I really wanted to know what was going on behind closed doors with those people!

Great characters, average mystery, frustrating police work.

The best thing about "Three Drowned Girls" is its characters, in particular its main protagonist, Detective Freya Sinclair, as well as her team and the woman who raised her. For that reason alone, I would consider picking up the second book in this series. I did, however, grow increasingly frustrated by the constant hints at Freya's traumatic past which was never fully explained; in fact, I feel like the book blurb told me more about it than the actual book itself. It would have worked better to have Freya's backstory fleshed out more, or left out altogether - it's perfectly okay to have a heroine who doesn't carry the weight of the world in the form of her own trauma on her shoulders.

The mystery itself, starting with the discovery of a drowned little girl on Freya's first day back to work in her hometown, is horrifying, but grows increasingly more implausible until it ends up in crazytown (and in such a small town, how many crazies can there be? And how many kids of the same age can go missing without anyone paying attention?). The story is also not quite what the blurb said it would be. For example, the white hair ribbon that is mentioned in the synopsis in particular is indeed found by Freya, but then never reappears in the story, and certainly not as an important clue or part of a soccer uniform, There are also, pretty much right from the start, more local girls missing than just Isa. I actually found myself wondering if I was reading an earlier version of the book at some point because of its deviation from what I had expected after reading the synopsis.

Finally, the police work / procedure in this book is just... questionable. Letting people touch photographs that were in evidence bags. Not carrying evidence bags when wandering through the woods looking for clues. Finding evidence (the white hair ribbon), yet never following up on it. Actually... never following up on a lot of things! There were so many loose ends in this, it made my head spin. Not processing a suspect, but letting them sit in an interrogation room *with their cell", before interviewing and processing them. And so on and so forth. On top of that, Freya went back and forth between frantically trying to do it all, not eating properly, and not sleeping - because, as numerous chapter endings remind the reader, she will not let these girls down- and then aimlessly wandering the woods for hours at a time looking for bright new ideas, or driving for more than an hour to another jurisdiction just to essentially turn around and head straight back, when local law enforcement could have done that job from the start.

All in all, I might give the series another shot because of the character development, but I was underwhelmed with the story as a whole.

TW for child abuse.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

My review can also be found on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210162915.

I really enjoyed this, I’m a huge detective fan and I love when I just fall straight in love with the team I adored Freya and Candy. I loved getting to know them and can’t wait to find out more about them and the rest of the characters.
The crime was shocking and a little disturbing. I was hooked from the start. It was fasted paced gripping and intense.
This is a great start to a new detective/crime book and I’m excited for more the characters are well written and have interesting backgrounds especially Freya. It’s also a nice easy read it flowed lovely and kept me interested.

Thank you to Net Galley, Bookouture and author Emily Shiner for the eARC of this book.

This is the first book of Emily Shiner's that I have read. I very much enjoyed it! When Freya Sinclair was a little girl, she had no idea what her parents were hiding in the basement of her childhood home…

After five years away from her hometown of Fawn Lake, Detective Freya Sinclair isn’t expecting a warm welcome from the people she’s sworn to protect. She became a detective to bring serial killers like her parents to justice, but the tight-knit North Carolinian community can’t see past her twisted roots.

Minutes after stepping foot back home, the body of a dark-haired young girl is pulled from the river and Freya races to the scene. She’s determined to identify the child and finally prove herself, but before Freya even has a chance to search through missing persons, another girl is reported missing.

Freya’s heart breaks at the sight of little Isa’s blonde ringlets and pristine soccer uniform in the photo her father clutches, but the look on his face says he doesn’t trust Freya. Does he think she’s just like her parents, or does he have a sinister secret of his own?

But when another innocent girl is found drowned, Freya finds a white hair ribbon snagged on a branch, and instantly recognizes it as part of the soccer team uniform at the local school…

Two drowned girls. One daughter still missing. Can Freya save Isa before she becomes the third victim? Or has the killer already set their sights on Freya next?

I really connected with the character Freya, and was curious to see how her character would develop, what secrets we would learn about her past. I liked her relationship with Esther. The character of Candy was great, a good side kick so to speak for Freya. I look forward to future books that will hopefully expand on Freya's past, her parents' crimes, and her own past.

3.75 out of 5 stars