Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars**
Erin’s brother, Bryan, went missing 5-years ago. His last known location was the small town of Faraday, Oregon, alongside the Clackamas River.
Erin has the opportunity to travel to Faraday, along with her friend, Hari, to work on a piece for their True Crime podcast. She’s not in town long, before it becomes clear that Bryan isn’t the only person to have gone missing from Faraday.
Erin quickly gets pulled into another missing person case, a more recent one, that of a young local woman, Elena Lopaz. Something stinks in this town…
After Elena’s deteriorated corpse is found, she’s transported to the morgue, from where she goes missing again, but how!? What the heck is going on in Faraday?
Girl in the Creek is an interesting story. I would say it’s a middle of the road read for me. It definitely had some compelling elements, and then had a few that were a bit more lackluster, IMO.
For me, the middle of the book was were it was the strongest. I was gripped as Erin really started digging in around Faraday, trying to get to the bottom of the disappearances and what could be behind them.
She ends up paring up with the older lady, Olivia, who owns the B&B she has rented, for a good portion of the investigation. I really liked the two of them working together. Olivia is a native of the town, whose own son went missing years before.
Olivia brought a lot to the table with her survival knowledge, and also her insight into the town and its history, of which her own father played a pivotal role.
There was also some really fun body horror included, and definitely more than one moment that made me cringe, which I love. Who doesn’t love that?
Gosh, I am realizing as I write this, how difficult it is to talk about this without spoiling anything. So much of what I want to say would give away the truth of what’s happening in Faraday and I definitely don’t want to do that.
I will say that I was a little disappointed by the way certain things were wrapped up. It almost felt like there was so much build, that was increasingly intense, and gripping, and then we get to the end and it’s like the author didn’t know how to wrap it up, so just threw some stuff in there and called it a day.
This seems harsh, I know it does, but I don’t know how else to express that feeling. I know that’s not true. I’m sure the author worked very, very hard bringing this to the conclusion that they wanted, but to me, it just felt overly simplistic in comparison to the build-up.
With this being said, this is a good Sporror story. I would recommend it to fans of EcoHorror. I loved the setting of the PNW, and felt like the author did a great job with building that sense of place. That was definitely one of the stronger aspects of the story for me.
Thank you to the publisher, Tor Nightfire, for providing me with a copy to read and review. This book certainly gave me a lot to think about, and I would be interested in picking up more from this author.