num_pages: 400
description: Iris Greenfeder, ABD (All But Dissertation), feels the “buts” are taking over her life: all but published, all but a professor, all but married. Yet the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother, Katherine Morrissey, leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime—and nestled inside it is the sad story of her death. It captures the attention of her mother’s former literary agent, who is convinced that Katherine wrote one final manuscript before her strange, untimely end in a fire thirty years ago. So Iris goes back to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother’s biography and search for the missing manuscript—and there she unravels a haunting mystery, one that holds more secrets than she ever expected. . . .
language: English
title: The Seduction of Water
titlecomplete: The Seduction of Water
genres: Mystery, Adult, Gothic, Suspense, Thriller, Romance, Contemporary, Fiction, Book Club, Mystery Thriller
ratings_count: 5131
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Hammett Prize
publisher: Ballantine Books