Water Like a Stone

Christmas in Cheshire is supposed to be a family visit for Duncan Kincaid, Gemma James, and the children, but the holiday turns darker when a mummified infant’s body is discovered hidden inside the wall of an old dairy under renovation. At the same time, along the nearby canals, the life of a woman living in self-imposed isolation begins to intersect with the case in unsettling ways. The result is a mystery that starts with a shocking discovery in an old building and gradually widens into something much more layered, linking family tensions, buried history, and violence spread across more than one timeline.

What gives Water Like a Stone its pull is the contrast between the season and the darkness underneath it. Deborah Crombie uses the holiday setting, Duncan’s return to his childhood town, and the canal country around Nantwich to create a story that feels outwardly calm but inwardly strained. The book’s atmosphere comes not just from murder, but from secrecy within families, old grief, and the uneasy sense that a place tied to memory can still be full of things no one wants uncovered.

The mystery also has a broader emotional range than a simple single-victim case. Publisher and review summaries point to multiple victims and to secrets held by both Duncan’s family and the local community, which gives the novel a more expansive, layered structure than a straightforward procedural. Rather than moving only through police interviews and clues, it builds suspense through the slow convergence of family strain, canal-side lives, and crimes that seem at first unrelated.

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