Review: Daughters of the Lake

Daughters of the Lake by Wendy Webb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Paranormal romance is not my genre, but this was on sale and I was in the mood for something off my beaten path, so here it is.

To my pleasant surprise, Wendy Webb is a real pro. This is cleverly plotted – I think it could work as a good old school horror movie/love story – and it moves quickly. Webb knows what she’s doing, and I found myself really enjoying the overall story: a 21st century woman, who’s just discovered her husband’s affair, begins dreaming about a woman from a century before. And then that woman’s body washes up on the lake shore outside her home.

I’ll try not to spoil too much in describing how the two women are connected, but I will say that Webb skillfully gives us a range of possibilities. Without being heavy-handed, she entices and misleads us into one after another theory.

All that said, this can’t escape the limits of its genre and, without trying to cause too much offense, this is a pretty limited genre. It rests on the safe premise that there is someone for everyone to love (that would be nice, wouldn’t it) and on the possibility that the laws of time and spirit are flexible (which is fun but untethered from traditional morality). As such, Kate is mostly too good to be true. She’s sinned against rather than sinning, and she makes essentially no mistakes in dealing with her husband’s betrayal. And, conveniently, there’s a single, handsome police detective who shows up on cue as Mr. Available.

There’s also her gay cousin who’s happily partnered off and who offers her a new home and a new job with the added promise that, since he’ll have no children, she and hers can inherit the totality of the family’s traditional estate. Almost everyone, we finally learn, is half of a deep and meaningful – if sometimes flawed – marriage.

[SPOILER:] The single exception to that is a minor character who, it turns out, is the actual secret murderer from a century before. She’s alone and determined to break up someone else’s marriage; she succeeds, but she’s immediately punished, in part by being the most forgotten character of her long-ago generation. Even the apparent killer, a crazed woman, gets to enjoy a happy marriage with a man who does everything he can to protect her.

The paranormal half of this is much more successful, though it runs about a chapter long into the reveal of the true killer. (Note to the future screenwriter of this: cut out that final part and just go with [SPOILER:] the insane great-grandmother as the obvious and necessary killer.)

Still, there’s no denying the fundamental cleverness of this. Even if some of the characters and their relationships flatten into generic convention, the situation remains intriguing and haunting. Kate’s discovery of her relationship to Addie, the drowned woman, unfolds with skillful pacing, and it’s haunting in satisfying ways.

I doubt I’ll be reading much more from that paranormal romance shelf. That said, it’s hard for me to imagine I’d find a better practitioner of the genre than Webb.


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