Megan Mazeros and Lauren Mabrey are complete opposites on paper. Megan is a girl from a modest Midwest background, and Lauren is the daughter of a senator from an esteemed New England family. When they become roommates at a private women’s college, they forge a strong, albeit unlikely, friendship, sharing clothes, advice and their most intimate secrets.
The summer before senior year, Megan joins Lauren and her family on their private island off the coast of Maine. It should be a summer of relaxation, a last hurrah before graduation and the pressures of postcollege life. Then late one night, something unspeakable happens, searing through the framework of their friendship and tearing them apart. Many years later, Megan publicly comes forward about what happened that fateful night, revealing a horrible truth and threatening to expose long-buried secrets.
In this captivating and moving novel, Paula Treick DeBoard explores the power of friendship and secrets, and shows how hiding from the truth can lead to devastating consequences.
PAULA TREICK DEBOARD is the author of The Mourning Hours, The Fragile World and The Drowning Girls. She is a lecturer in writing at the University of California, Merced, and lives in Northern California with her husband, Will, and their four-legged brood.
The Drowning Girls
The Fragile World
The Mourning Hours
Here We Lie
Paula Treick DeBoard
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Paula Treick DeBoard 2018
Paula Treick DeBoard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9781474083607
Praise for the novels of Paula Treick DeBoard
“In Paula Treick DeBoard’s latest breathtaking thriller, she paints a stark and chillingly real portrayal of a family torn apart by teenage transgressions. Gritty and inauspicious from the start, The Drowning Girls left me awestruck, revealing DeBoard’s true brilliance as an author. Spellbinding.”
—Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl
“Think Fatal Attraction meets Desperate Housewives, and you have DeBoard’s latest thriller.... This is a gripping, tense suspense story with a good surprise ending.”
—Booklist
“Give this tale of domestic suspense, with its pitch-perfect pacing, to Gillian Flynn and Mary Kubica devotees.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“The Drowning Girls by Paula Treick DeBoard is cleverly plotted, full of twists and turns and so well-written that it pulls you in from page one. Genuinely suspenseful, DeBoard delivers a disturbing, multilayered, provocative novel that is impossible to put down.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence
“A heart-pounding look at what lies behind the deceptively placid veneer of the well-to-do suburbs. The kaleidoscopic view of innocence, danger, and malice shifts and twists as it races to a shattering conclusion.”
—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One
“This tale of a family in peril closes with a death that’s tragic and unexpected.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fans of The Good Girl and The Luckiest Girl Alive, and really anyone who enjoys great suspense, have found their next must-read... I could not put it down.”
—Catherine McKenzie, bestselling author of Fractured and Hidden
“A coming-of-age tale about a family in crisis expertly told by Ms. DeBoard. The Fragile World examines how profound loss changes all who are forced to come to terms with it. Touching and compelling, it will move you.”
—Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing
“The Drowning Girls casts a spell as brilliant and alluring as the gated community of its setting. Paula Treick DeBoard maps this world of privilege and secrets with a deft hand... A suspenseful and compelling page-turner.”
—Karen Brown, author of The Clairvoyants and The Longings of Wayward Girls
For my sisters—the ones I was born with, and the ones I met along the way.
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