The Drowning by J P Smith

Summer Camp - for me it was interesting as we do not do summer camps. You send children on school trips for the day and are very nervous till they return! the idea of sending them for weeks somewhere without parents is a little difficult to fathom or accept.

Joey Proctor was a little boy. Little in physique as well. Seemed to have been the ideal size for bullies. Alex Mason was the swimming coach himself just a young man. He was maybe a bit without empathy and only sought to make the boys tougher, and his one goal was that at the end of the camp he would make them swim. Whatever it took. This is what he did to Joey. He left him at the end of a raft hoping he would dive in and join the other boys. He never did. He disappeared. His body never found. Left to a ripple tide of effects felt far and wide.

We go fast forward twenty one years. Alex Mason is married, very rich, very well established in one of the biggest construction companies in his part of the world. He has two young children. Things start happening to him. His pool gets filled with blood tainted water with a slogan chiseled out at the bottom, he gets snapped feeling up a girl at a bar and the photos are sent to his wife, the locks in his so called unbreakable security system at home are broken and the intruder videos the whole family sleeping and sends it to them. All connected back to the disappearance of Joey Proctor. But, and this is a big but there are no demands. It seems like a slow process of breaking Alex Mason down. From his losing an employee (again the same swimming technique he used with Joey) because he thought the young Peter was actually Joey and then covering it up to look a suicide, to the murder of an old man on a visit to the camp who tried to insinuate that he knew exactly what had happened to the slow loss of his contracts to a competitor the whole situation breaks up both Alex and his marriage and you know this is not going to end well.

This was a creepy one because it was insidious, slow and vicious. I did not know who the perpetrator was till the end.

Good characterization. You tended to look on Alex with dislike not just because of what he did to Joey but he was callous and cold hearted and distant with everyone including his family.

Sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review, courtesy of Sourcebooks  Landmark.