Where the Water Lies

Christopher Schimmel

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Bella Carter built a career out of noticing what everyone else misses—the loose thread, the detail that doesn't fit. She left the small Michigan town where she grew up years ago, and built a life two thousand miles away, far from the things that happened at the water there.Sent home on a soft assignment meant to save her career, she means to stay three days. Write the story, don't dig, don't look back. But the town isn't the one she left. Men are turning up dead by the river, there are warnings no one will explain, and her uncle's quiet kindness sets something crawling beneath her skin. The deeper she pulls, the more the pieces fit—and Bella has always been very good at making pieces fit.The question that's haunted her since childhood is the one she can't stop asking now: what if she's right? The far more dangerous one is the question she never thinks to ask.A slow-burning debut about grief, obsession, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive—one that will make you distrust every conclusion you reach, right up to the moment the water gives up what it holds.

Christopher Schimmel is a Michigan native whose lifelong fascination with true crime is the engine behind his fiction—a fascination with not just what people do, but why, and what the people around them choose not to see. He's drawn to stories that live in the gray spaces: ordinary places, ordinary people, and the secrets that hold quietly beneath the surface. When he isn't writing, he's usually at the racetrack chasing the noise and speed of motorsports, or hiking with his dog, Franklin, somewhere in the backwoods. He began this novel during the stillness of 2020 and returned to it years later, determined to finish what he'd started—spending countless hours building its characters and untangling its secrets until the story finally felt true. Where the Water Lies is his debut novel.