★ Winner of the Literary Global Book Award for Debut Fiction ★

"This snappy, suspenseful thriller will keep you guessing until the final chapter and will make you wonder-can anyone be a journalist?" - Katie Couric, journalist and author

"Tremendous book. You'll be transfixed." -- Peter King, sportswriter and author

"It grabs you by the collar and won't let go." - Jo Piazza, bestselling author of The Sicilian Inheritance

Description:

A popular fishing captain is murdered on his own trawler and everyone in Haversport, Massachusetts, knows the culprit is a young deckhand named Ben Broome, including Detective Lillian Grimes. But Ben has discovered the perfect hiding place: as a reporter writing for the tiny Coastal Packet, a newspaper down in South Carolina.

When a half-eaten body washes in, it becomes the biggest story in the paper's history and brings cunning, charismatic Ben immediate success. But it also leads Grimes closer to the truth. She soon teams up with hungry rival reporter Florence Park to hunt Ben down before he can charm-or kill-his way to freedom.

Shown from three perspectives, killer, detective, and reporter, Muddy the Water brings readers inside the newsroom of a struggling small newspaper on the bucolic South Carolina coast and speaks to the concept of identity-and whether anyone ever shows his or her true self.