The Girl in the Lake

A Novel (Dept of Unexplained Phenomenon, Book 1)

By: Lauren Oliver

A young girl who claims to remember a past life draws a psychologist into a decades-old mystery in a haunting novel of suspense by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver.

Kate Willis, consultant for the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, is tasked with interviewing six-year-old Henley Haskell about the girl’s alleged past-life recollections. The evaluation also marks a return for Kate to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and to troubling recollections of her own.

Here, twenty-four years ago, Kate’s friend Becca McGuire vanished from her bunk at a now-shuttered summer camp and was never seen again—presumably drowned in Lake Sauquamet. But the mystery of her disappearance is only deepening. Because Henley’s memories of her “other life” are ones that could only belong to Becca.

For Kate, Henley’s recurring, suffocating nightmares, and her disturbing illustrations of places she has never been, seem to spell out the unbelievable. Somewhere, somehow, the truth about what really happened to Becca is locked inside this little girl. As Henley’s uncanny memories surface, so do old secrets—each one drawing Kate inexorably back to that terrible long-ago summer by the lake.

©2026 by Laura Schechter. (P)2026 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“I devoured The Girl in the Lake, which has everything I adore in a book—relatable characters; thrills and chills; a layered, propulsive plot; and enormous heart. It’s about secrets, loss, grief, and love, and I still have chills of the very best kind. Stunning.” —Jennifer Niven, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“The Girl in the Lake is my favorite type of story: part supernatural investigation, part small-town mystery, and utterly captivating from the first page to the last. Lauren Oliver seamlessly blends the supernatural with the psychological in a twisted, decades-spanning puzzle that kept me guessing right up until the very end. I devoured this book.” —Lauren Thoman, author of I’ll Stop the World and You Shouldn’t Be Here