In The Drowning Game, Nadia Brenner goes to Singapore and finds that Cass, her sister, has jumped from a fortieth-floor hotel balcony. Devastated, Nadia must arrange for the transportation of her sister’s remains back to the Pacific Northwest, regain ground that Cass has lost in the scheduled construction of a wealthy Chinese man’s mega-yacht, and try to investigate her sister’s death—all while being chased by Chinese thugs and nefarious CIA agents. The Brenner family owns Ocean House, a yacht-building empire whose income is sliding into the red with new competitors that are also stealing Ocean House employees.
I’ve read most of Barbara Nickless’s series and some of her standalone novels, and this was the first book I have been disappointed in. The first half of the book is slow, and I had a hard time getting invested in the lives of the ultra-rich and their mega-yachts. The second half of the book moves much more quickly, but it’s all over the place: artificial intelligence, Nazis, Chinese triads and Chinese spies, double and triple agents, family health issues, a dark family secret—and a too good to be true resurrection. I lived in Singapore (albeit fifty years ago) and have visited Monaco, and the details seem true to what I remember about those locales.
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The Drowning Game (Thomas & Mercer, January 1, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble (paperback)
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You can read my reviews of other Barbara Nickless novels here:
The Evan Wilder series:
The Sydney Rose Parnell series
Blood on the Track, Dead Stop, Ambush, and Gone to Darkness
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