Where the
Water Lies

A novel by Christopher Schimmel

This title will be available on Kindle and in paperback on October 27.

Bella Carter sees patterns other people miss. It's what made her a good reporter, and it's what nearly ended her career when she saw one that wasn't there.Years ago she left the small Michigan town where she grew up and built a life two thousand miles away, far from the pond behind her uncle's house and the summer her cousin didn't come out of it alive. Now a harmless human-interest assignment is sending her back. She plans to stay three days, just long enough to file the story and leave before the place can get its hooks back in.But home isn't quite as she remembers. Two men have turned up dead in the river, there are questions no one wants to answer, and her uncle's quiet kindness sets something crawling beneath her skin. The closer she looks, the clearer the pattern becomes—and Bella has always been able to find a pattern in anything.
The question that's haunted her since childhood is the one she can't stop asking now: what if she's right? The more dangerous question is the one 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 the secrets it holds.

About the Author

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.

Leave a Review

Have you read Where the Water Lies? Please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. For an independent author, a few honest words from a reader are the biggest way a book finds its way into other hands. It truly makes all the difference.

• Amazon
• Goodreads

Connect with the author

@ChristopherSchimmel.Author[email protected]

Submit your request!

Contact the author for inquiries regarding book signings, events and general questions.