This book grabs you right from the first page and doesn't let you go! I couldn't put it down and finished it in 3 days. It was a very entertaining mystery.

LEARNING TO SWIM by Sarah Henry begins, you guessed it, in the water, Lake Champlain, specifically. Troy (female) jumps into the lake from her ferry boat when she sees what appears to be a child falling from a passing ferry boat. This not-very-good swimmer somehow manages to find the drowning little boy, resuscitate him, remove his sweatshirt that ties his arms, then swim to shore with him.

The rest of Chapter 1 bugged the heck out of me: while Troy does call the police, she won’t give them her name or tell them where she is. Then she calls her boyfriend to explain why she isn’t coming over, but she doesn’t tell him what happened, either. I didn’t have high hopes for the rest of the book.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Turns out, Troy had reasons for not telling anyone. This issue was not ignored, as I had feared.

Now she has quickly become attached to the boy, who finally tells her his name, Paul. Troy later meets Paul’s father, Phillipe, and becomes personally involved with their lives in Canada and law enforcement there.

Throughout the story is the question: who tried to drown Paul? Troy has other questions as well, but that one question is what they all boil down to. The book becomes more and more suspenseful as every character, particularly Phillipe and his brother-in-law, is suspect and as Troy’s willingness to help Paul threatens to put her in danger.

This is a good thriller, and my initial impression was proved wrong. After Chapter 1, I was no longer aggravated by Troy’s mishandling of the legalities of Paul’s situation, and the story became more and more suspenseful with every subsequent chapter.

I was, however, aggravated that the book contained several grammatical errors throughout. Perhaps these stood out for me because I'm a technical editor, and most readers won't even notice. Regardless, Henry did say on her Facebook page that these will be corrected in the paperback edition of LEARNING TO SWIM.

I recommend this to readers who love thrillers and would appreciate a change from what they normally read, the formulaic mysteries/thrillers. This is different. And I’m happy to tell you that Henry plans a sequel.