What the Lake Keeps

About this book

Lake Mead has shrunk in a record drought, and a sealed steel drum with a body inside has come up out of the mud near Calder Bay. Deputy Ren Acosta and a weary cold-case detective, Gabe Sorrell, have only days before the rains return and the water covers the evidence again.

The lake has been falling for twenty-two years. This summer, it gives up its dead.

When a record drought drains Lake Mead to its bones, a boy’s metal detector turns up a welded steel drum in the cracked mud below the stranded town of Calder Bay. Inside: a body the cold deep water kept whole for forty years, and a casino chip from a Las Vegas house that was imploded decades ago.

Deputy Ren Acosta has spent her whole life believing the town’s story that her father walked into this same water one night in 1991 and simply never came back. Burned-out cold-case detective Gabe Sorrell, three weeks from a retirement he doesn’t want, recognizes the chip from the first case he ever failed to close. As the lake keeps dropping, the bodies keep surfacing—in the wrong order—and every road runs back through the man who built Calder Bay, held it together through every dry year, and raised Ren after her own father vanished.

But a monsoon is coming. A managed release is opening upstream. In days the water will rise and re-drown the channel and everything in it, and the truth will be a hundred feet down in the cold again, past any court. Ren and Gabe have until the rain wins to prove what the lake has been keeping—and to survive the man who has spent thirty-five years making sure she never looked at the water.

A propulsive, ripped-from-the-headlines mystery of drought, water, and buried crime in the New West—for readers of Jane Harper, Michael Connelly, and Attica Locke.