My name is Emma Brennan, and I never thought I’d find myself in this position — standing on a Cape Cod beach at sunrise, wondering which of my friends is a killer.
I came to the idyllic seaside town of Provincetown, to raise my young niece and figure out what to do next with my life. Eleven months ago my sister vanished off the coast of Ocracoke Island. No body, no answers. Just a teenage daughter left behind — and me. At the same time, the man I thought I was going to marry cheated on me with a cute young florist.
I joined the Tragic Wives’ Group — a tight-knit, cold-water swimming group with enough personal drama to fill a bestseller. And one of us has put it in a manuscript, spilling all our secrets.
Then she disappears . . . leaving just a pile of clothes on the sand. She’s the second person I’ve lost in twelve months. (Synopsis courtesy of Goodreads.)
The Swimming Group is an excellent whodunnit, primarily because it starts out so innocuously. Emma is part of a ragtag group of unique individuals who meet up regularly to cold-water swim, but beneath the surface of the group bears the need to heal from various tragedies within their lives. For Emma, her primary tragedy involves her missing sister, who had vanished after swimming off the coast of Ocracoke Island. A plotline that runs concurrently with that event is her recently failed marriage. Relocating herself to Cape Cod was done as a means of self-preservation, and to help her niece recover from losing her mother.
But then one of the swimming group members goes missing. All they have to go by is a pile of clothes and some other personal belongings, but no one knows what happened or why the person is missing. Or how it happened to her. Suddenly, everyone is a suspect, and no one is safe. The slow unraveling of trust was depicted well, without anything feeling too rushed or pushed on to the reader, allowing the opportunity to come to their own conclusions. Even still, there was a particular bombshell that hit hard and sent me reeling! I couldn’t believe the deeper issues that Emma has to face, with me feeling just as shocked as she does when the truth is finally revealed.
The various relationships between the Tragic Wives’ Group was intricate and provided a lot of background to each and every eventual suspect. Woven into the mix is the opportunity for romance, as well as forming deeper friendships and connections, but with everything going on it’s hard to know who is really in Emma’s corner. In the end, I didn’t necessarily agree with the decisions made in order to rectify what really happened to the missing Tragic Wives’ Group member, but it made sense.
The best part of the story was the gradual ramp up of raising the stakes and revealing what’s really going on behind the surface of things. Emma thinks things are the way they are and nothing can be changed, but if I learned anything from The Swimming Group, it’s that nothing is the way it seems and much like the cold waters she swims in, the landscape of the world is unpredictable and can at times become uncontrollable, too. It was a definite five-star read!
Thanks to Bella Ellwood Clayton for the book in exchange for an honest review.
Also by Bella Ellwood-Clayton: Weekend Friends
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