In her debut novel, Drowned, Therese Bowman offers something a little different from the crime fiction her Swedish compatriots have been producing with such success: it's never entirely clear whether this story involves a crime at all. However, the sense of chilly dread that suffuses this brief, psychologically intense novel approaches thriller levels in places.
Marina is a graduate student visiting her sister Stella and Stella's partner, Gabriel, in a small town during an unusually hot, sultry Swedish summer. She's supposed to be working on an art history assignment, but isn't getting much done; Gabriel, a novelist, is similarly struggling with his current work-in-progress. Stuck at the house together while Stella is at work at the town parks department, something seems to be happening between them, but they don't speak about it. There seem to be some things Stella won't speak about either, and the secrets weigh as heavily on the characters as the late-summer humidity. Marina's summer visit ends; the novel picks up several months later when she returns, after Stella has disappeared. In the short days of a cold, wet late autumn, Marina tries to sort out what happened to her sister... and what is still happening between her and Gabriel.
Drowned puts both its protagonist and its reader on edge almost from the beginning and never really allows either to become settled or comfortable. It's an effective, suspenseful psychological mystery that will add some provocative chills to the summer-reading list. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness