The Drowning Girls

One simple sacrifice is all they need.

Cast a stone. Aim true. Let her sink.

Nate can't believe he's dragged himself up to this backwater town. Port Flinders would have fallen off the map years ago, except for one thing. Tourists flock to its mangrove-lined shores for the annual Drowning Girl festival: sacrifice a girl at sea, and the fishing hauls that keep the town afloat will prosper. Or don't and the whole town will sink.

But it's just a legend, a gimmick. Everybody knows that.

As fireworks light up the night sky, a woman's body is pulled from the inky waters of the gulf. Shock waves threaten to tear Port Flinders apart when she's identified as Kelsey Webb: a local teenager thought dead for twenty-five years.

As Nate tries to find the truth about what happened to Kelsey, he uncovers a string of deadly accidents over the decades. All women. All drowned. And always during the festival.

In his search for answers, the legend of the Drowning Girl begins to take hold of Nate, weaving its way into his head and threatening to pull him under, and he begins to question which sacrifices are truly necessary.

About the Author

Veronica Lando is an Australian crime author who won the 2021 Banjo Prize for her then-unpublished manuscript The Whispering.

As a child, she grew up above her parents' Melbourne bookstore, surrounded by other people's stories. Now, as an adult, she lives in Queensland and enjoys using the uniquely wild and sometimes dangerous landscapes of the far north to shape her writing.

In 2020, she placed in the Scarlet Stiletto awards and has since had short stories published in anthologies with both Sisters in Crime Australia and the Queensland Writers' Centre.

Veronica currently lives in Townsville with her husband and three children.