Clear Water by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes: A haunting mystery shaped by grief and the natural world

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes’s Clear Water is an atmospheric novel that blends mystery, suspense, and myth to explore the lingering effects of loss and the secrets communities bury rather than confront. Set in a Wisconsin town where young women have been disappearing for years, the story follows Alma Figueroa as she investigates a series of strange sightings involving girls dressed in white. With its snow-covered forests, unsettling supernatural possibilities, and a protagonist struggling to make peace with her past, the novel offers plenty to draw readers into its world. However, an implausible sequence of events in the opening chapter nearly kept me from discovering what the book does so well.

When Alma encounters a girl beside the road during a snowstorm, she takes the girl to the hospital, where it becomes clear that the blood covering her does not belong to her. Given the circumstances, I found it difficult to believe that no one contacted the police, especially when the girl appeared to be a minor. Instead, the hospital receptionist is the only person who questions Alma about what happened, and the hospital ultimately allows Alma to take the girl home. The scene requires readers to accept a series of unlikely decisions without sufficient explanation, and I found myself questioning the author’s grasp of basic hospital procedures before the story had a chance to establish its credibility.

Writers do not need to reproduce every mundane detail of real life, but they do need to understand the rules and procedures that shape their characters’ experiences. Research into how hospitals respond to unidentified patients, unexplained injuries, and possible cases of abuse or criminal activity could have helped Fuentes construct a more convincing opening. Although privacy laws such as HIPAA protect patients’ medical information, they do not categorically prevent healthcare professionals from reporting suspected crimes or cooperating with law enforcement when legally permitted or required. The specifics depend on the circumstances and applicable state law, but the novel’s handling of this encounter felt too convenient to accept without question.

The consequences of that opening extended beyond my initial frustration. Once a story gives readers reason to doubt its understanding of the world it depicts, even small details can attract scrutiny they might otherwise escape. I found myself questioning the plausibility of later developments, and Fuentes had to work harder to regain my trust than she would have if the novel had established a more convincing foundation. This was frustrating because the book has genuine strengths, and I suspect I would have been more willing to surrender to its strange possibilities if its opening had felt grounded in reality. Supernatural fiction can ask readers to accept almost anything, provided the ordinary world surrounding those extraordinary events feels sufficiently real.

Fortunately, Fuentes proves much more assured when she turns her attention to the landscape and the mysteries taking shape within it. Her descriptions of Brewer and its surroundings give the setting a vivid, almost tangible presence. Snow settles over the woods, darkness gathers along the roads, and the natural world seems to hold knowledge that the people living among it have either forgotten or deliberately suppressed. The environment does more than establish a gloomy backdrop; it becomes an essential part of the novel’s identity, creating the sense that the town’s past has seeped into the land itself. Fuentes captures the isolation of a winter landscape while allowing its beauty to coexist with the threat of something lurking beyond ordinary understanding.

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The novel’s central mystery also benefits from this careful atmospheric construction. Alma is the first to see a girl in white, but the sightings multiply as other people begin to report similar encounters in the snow and woods. These figures do not match the records of the young women who have disappeared from Brewer, leaving Alma to wonder who they are and what connection they might have to the town’s history. Fuentes handles this uncertainty with considerable skill, repeatedly shifting the reader’s perspective just when a plausible explanation seems within reach. The girls might be living people, supernatural apparitions, or something that resists such easy categorization. Each new development unsettles the assumptions that came before it, keeping the mystery alive without making it feel as though the author is simply withholding answers.

Alma’s investigation is inseparable from her own history of loss. Her sister, Kayla, disappeared into addiction and eventually died, leaving Alma with grief that has shaped her relationship with Brewer. She once vowed never to return, yet the town continues to draw her back, carrying memories of both the love she found there and the heartbreak that followed. As Alma searches for answers about the girls in white, she must also confront the personal history she has tried to leave behind. This connection between the supernatural mystery and Alma’s unresolved grief gives the investigation emotional weight beyond the question of what is haunting the woods. The missing girls represent more than an inexplicable phenomenon; their presence forces the community to reckon with suffering that has gone unacknowledged for too long.

I appreciated the way Fuentes allows the mystery to remain intertwined with the landscape rather than treating it as a puzzle that can be solved through evidence alone. The woods seem to offer their own form of testimony, while the town’s silences reveal how much can be concealed beneath the appearance of an ordinary community. The novel draws on the conventions of noir and suspense while making room for mythic elements that resist straightforward interpretation. Its strongest passages emerge from this uneasy relationship between what can be explained and what remains beyond the reach of reason. Even when I questioned the mechanics of the plot, I remained interested in the strange girls appearing across Brewer and in the possibility that their presence might expose truths the town would rather keep buried.

Ultimately, Clear Water is a novel whose considerable literary strengths are undermined by a preventable lapse in plausibility. Fuentes writes with an impressive command of atmosphere, and her portrayal of a winter-bound town gives the story an evocative sense of place. She also sustains the mystery surrounding the girls in white with enough skill to keep readers reconsidering what they believe. Yet the opening chapter created doubts that lingered throughout my reading, making it harder for me to immerse myself fully in the story. For readers who prioritize mood, ambiguity, and richly rendered natural settings, the novel may offer a rewarding experience. I enjoyed much of what Fuentes accomplished, even as I wished the story had established a firmer foundation for its more extraordinary events.

Clear Water by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes will be published on November 3, 2026. It is a compelling choice for readers drawn to literary suspense and mysteries that blur the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds. Despite my reservations about the opening, I found much to admire in Fuentes’s writing, especially her ability to make a landscape feel haunted by the things its inhabitants refuse to confront.

How much does an implausible plot detail affect your ability to enjoy an otherwise well-written novel? Have you ever nearly abandoned a book over a moment that strained your credibility, only to find yourself glad you kept reading? Share your thoughts in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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