Haywood Academy is located along the coast of a small Maine town. The ocean is full of stories, and some of the young women from the school have found themselves a part of those. This is the setting for Carol Goodman’s latest thriller, THE SEA OF LOST GIRLS, which takes some of the horrors that have haunted this town and adds some more tragedy to that history.

A keeper of many secrets is our tale's narrator, Tess Henshaw. She is married to Harmon, a former teacher of hers when she was at Haywood, and has a 17-year-old son named Rudy. Rudy is a key figure in the story as he is a fairly broken young man with some apparent PTSD left over from a traumatic childhood. The proceedings open with Rudy phoning and then texting his mother, Tess, around 3am one night. He wants her to pick him up and says he can be found in the SP, which is code for "safe space," a place known only to Tess and Rudy where he would run off to as a child to escape harm.

"THE SEA OF LOST GIRLS provides what all good psychological thrillers should: complex characters and situations coupled with unpredictable and unexpected plot twists that keep you on the edge right up to the final pages."

Tess gets Rudy and brings him home after speaking with him for a bit in the SP --- a small cave located off the dangerous Maiden Stone waters. She often spies on Rudy's texts because of her constant worry for him, and finds a number of messages back and forth between him and his girlfriend, Lila Zeller. She hopes all is well because she likes Lila and feels she is a good influence in her son's life.

Regrettably, the news travels quickly the next morning that Lila's body was found just off the shore of the dangerous waterway. Was she murdered, or did she merely slip and fall off the oceanside trail where she jogged each morning? This is what Officer Kevin Bantree will have to sort out. There are so many highs and lows in this novel that it keeps readers steadily off-balance. For instance, Lila had just celebrated the opening of the play she directed at Haywood, Arthur Miller's classic "The Crucible." She also seemed to have gotten somewhat obsessed with the history of the other young women or “lost girls” that Haywood has produced over the years, and felt that "The Crucible" was an ironic way to honor them. Little did she know that she would soon join their ranks.

There are a tight handful of suspects: Rudy, who had an argument with Lila and left the cast party to run to his SP before contacting Tess; Harmon, who was advising Lila on her senior paper and was rumored to have gotten quite close to her; and 70-year-old Woody Hull, who is still at Haywood and has been whispered to be the prime suspect in the disappearance and death of the other girls. But the best suspect is still to be revealed.

What sets this book apart from much of Goodman's prior work is that the true evil here is not one bound by legend, literary fantasy or the supernatural. It is entirely more earthbound, which makes it that much more frightening. In the end, THE SEA OF LOST GIRLS provides what all good psychological thrillers should: complex characters and situations coupled with unpredictable and unexpected plot twists that keep you on the edge right up to the final pages. And, of course, with Goodman being a well-read teacher of literature, there is plenty of lore.