Title: Found Drowned
Author: Laurie Glenn-Norris
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Genre: Young Adult/New Adult Fiction, Historical fiction, Inspired by true events, unsolved cases
Pages:
Rating: 4/5 stars
Review:
Found Drowned was that historical fiction, true, unsolved, murder mystery that makes a great read. It’s a pretty short little book, and I liked reading every little thing about it. This is the kind of book that keeps you reading until the end, waiting for the ending, or the reveal. I thought it was all very nicely written, with good characters, and nice plot. I thought that it was even more interesting when I found out that it was based on true events. Mary Harney is the girl who was found drowned, washed up on the shores of Prince Edward Island, her body drifted all the way from Nova Scotia. The story is told from multiple POVs, the POV of the people who found her, and flashbacks to Mary’s POV, her life before, and then her family’s POV as well. I thought the use of the multiple POVs was very well used, and there was enough suspense in it, and the information between people didn’t overlap twice. It’s tricky when you’re basing something on a real story, there’s a lot of research that goes into it, then you have to stay true to the real events, while making it so that it reads like a story and not a history book. I thought this was very well executed. This was quite small book, so that doesn’t leave me with quite a lot to write about, but I thought it had a very solid storyline and that it was well told. I was also satisfied with the ending, and I think it was nice, because when it comes to true events like this, they’re better left unsolved. There’s no reason to want to come up with a whole different and untrue case, it doesn’t even turn into a whodunnit mystery. It’s just simply a mystery. And some cases are better left unsolved.

Here’s the official synopsis from Nimbus:
Based on a true unsolved crime from 1877, Laurie Glenn Norris’s debut novel tells the story of two small towns linked by the disappearance of a teenage girl. Mary Harney is a dreamy teenager in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, whose ambitions are stifled by her tyrannical grandmother and alcoholic father. When Mary’s mother becomes ill, an already fragile domestic situation quickly begins to unravel until the September evening when the girl goes missing.
Across the water on Prince Edward Island we meet Gilbert Bell, whose son finds a body washed up on the beach below the family farm. As the community is visited first by the local coroner and then by investigators, Glenn Norris paints a fascinating and darkly comic picture of judicial and forensic procedures of the time. At once tightly plotted and pensive, the novel travels back to the circumstances that led to Mary’s disappearance and then back further to the circumstances of her parents’ marriage, all the while building toward a raucous courtroom finale.