Series: Department of Unexplained Phenomena #1 Format: 321 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: June 1, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
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.
The Girl in the Lake is Lauren Oliver’s adult-thriller debut and the first book in her Dept. of Unexplained Phenomenon series: a dual-timeline mystery that sits right on the fault line between skepticism and the uncanny. The story follows 40-year-old Kate Willis, a psychologist who consults for the University of Virginia’s real-life Division of Perceptual Studies. She is sent to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to interview six-year-old Henley Haskell, who talks about an “other life” with startling specificity.
The case pulls Kate back to the shuttered Camp Sauquamet and Lake Sauquamet, where her best friend, Becca McGuire, vanished at fourteen and was presumed drowned. Henley’s nightmares, drawings, and private details increasingly look like Becca’s. Kate’s job is to look for suggestion, family leakage, trauma, and fraud. The novel keeps asking whether Henley is a vessel, a child absorbing a story, or something messier than either explanation. Kate is a skeptic with a messy private life—work as armor, old drinking as another kind of burial, a return home that she has postponed for decades.
She's complicated rather than heroic, and the plot only works because she has to test her own beliefs. The “Then” chapters are Oliver’s real advantage. Her YA background shows in the camp material: the Cat Pack’s shifting alliances, the cruelty of girlhood, the Gray Lady legend, secrets used as currency. Becca is not a sainted missing girl. She is magnetic, unstable, loyal, and dangerous in the way fourteen-year-olds can be when they collect other people’s weaknesses. That makes the present-day investigation feel like unfinished adolescence rather than a cold-case procedural.
Atmosphere does a lot of the work. The Berkshires, the abandoned camp, Fair Isle, the lake, and the local ghost story give the book a damp, closed-in Gothic mood without abandoning a clinical present. Oliver researched children who report previous-life memories, and that grounding makes Henley’s details more unsettling than a straightforward haunting would. The best version of this book is not “reincarnation is real.”
It is a story about memory as something the mind edits in order to survive, about group guilt, and about whether a landscape can hold what people refuse to say. The supernatural is allowed to breathe; it doesn't have to win the argument. Pacing is my biggest complaint. The first half and middle lean on interviews, verification, and circling the same questions—how does Henley know this, who told her, what is Kate willing to admit? If you want a mystery that stays foggy all the way through, the landing may feel a shade too assembled.
Themes- Memory as construction, not archive
- Secrets as power and as poison
- Skepticism as protection
- The exact moment play turns into culpability
- Whether a ghost is a spirit or a conscience that will not stay sunk
Pick this up if you like Lisa Jewell / Megan Miranda / Jennifer McMahon territory, Yellowjackets-adjacent summer-camp rot, or thrillers that flirt with the paranormal without fully converting. Skip it if you want a lean, twist-every-chapter thriller or a hard-commit ghost novel. This is a character-driven slow burn that becomes a rescue/reckoning, then leaves a door slightly open for the series.
Interesting. I kept putting off picking this one up as I wasn't sure if there would be any paranormal vibe. I gathered that there could be, but it'd be small. The pacing also worried me. I enjoyed a few of Oliver's YA thrillers she wrote towards the end so I still might give it a chance at some point. Glad you liked it to some degree. Nice review!
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