Based on a true story. Mine.

When I was eight years old, spending eight weeks in a summer camp in Upstate New York, a swimming counselor told us to jump into the deep water. I couldn’t swim, and had a profound fear of that deep water. But, assuming that I’d immediately take to it as though I were an Olympic swimmer, he instead threw me in, and when I began to panic and drown he took hold of me and swam me out to a raft, only to tell me that I’d either have to swim back on my own or stay there and die. That memory became the beginning of the novel called The Drowning. Because that’s when I disappeared.

***

Every seven years, a boy disappears from Camp Waukeelo.

Who will be next?

It doesn’t take long for a little boy to disappear. Joey Proctor can’t swim, but that doesn’t stop camp counselor Alex Mason from leaving him out on a raft in the middle of the lake in a fit of rage. Alex only meant to scare the kid, teach him a lesson. He didn’t mean to forget about him. But now Joey is gone…and his body is never found.

More than twenty years later, Alex is a success. The proof is there for anyone to see, in the millions of dollars he makes, his lavish house, his beautiful wife and daughters. And no one knows what happened that summer at camp. At least, no one should know. But it looks like Joey Proctor may be back to take his revenge…

“An overbearing alpha male gets his comeuppance in this smart, creepy thriller from Smith. One summer day, when Alex Mason was an arrogant swimming counselor at Camp Waukeelo in the Berkshires, he left timid eight-year-old Joey Proctor behind on a raft in the middle of a lake. Joey inexplicably vanished, but Alex lied well enough to avoid blame. Twenty-one years later, he’s a famous New York real estate developer with a lovely family and a glamorous lifestyle. Then increasingly serious intrusions from his guilty past suggest that someone—or something—remembers Joey’s panic and wants Alex to share it. As it turns out, the immature, violent side of Alex’s nature doesn’t need much prodding to reveal itself. Smith nicely balances the borderline-supernatural events with Alex’s mundane struggles as his blustering defenses crumble. Sharp, clear prose is a plus. This is a remarkably adept performance.”

—STARRED review, Publishers Weekly

“Alex Mason has it all: a lavish lifestyle, a beautiful family, a thriving career. He’s built his life around the certainty that no one would discover what really happened twenty years ago at an idyllic summer camp. He’s wrong. The Drowning is an edge-of-your-seat read.”

—Kaira Rouda, bestselling author of Best Day Ever and What Comes Around

“How many times have you started reading a book, and realized—you could not put it down? Isn’t that the best? And that’s exactly what happened to me with JP Smith’s THE DROWNING. I sat in the chair for hours, I mean not moving, and so much for making dinner. We had pizza, courtesy of JP Smith.”

—Award-winning mystery-writer and investigative reporter for ABC news in Boston, Hank Phillippi Ryan.

“J.P. Smith has hit this one out of the park. Great characters, a plot that will draw you from the first to the last page and destined to be a must read book of 2019.”

— Strand Magazine

***Currently in development at ChapkaTV and La Belle Ouvrage as a film or limited series on French television.***

Read The Kid on the Raft for my half of the story: https://shorturl.at/uTUZ2

The Drowning can be found at most bookstores, or at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

A Barnes & Noble Bestseller

Also available in French as Noyade from Gallimard’s Série Noire imprint, and as a Folio paperback.