What the Water Gives Back

The lake took him thirty years ago. Now his sister has come to Valdeniebla with a photograph and a date.Two years after the Order was dragged into the light, Valdeniebla is trying to forget. Laura still runs the lake trail every morning, and Marcos Serrano is still at the Guardia Civil post, with a disciplinary file four hundred pages thick and a superior who would rather he had never set foot in the valley.Then a woman from Bilbao knocks on Laura's door. Her name is Irene Salcedo. Her brother Julián vanished near the Cerval thirty years ago, and she has just found his name in a ledger that officially no longer exists.In the next valley over, the Sorbín Spring has begun giving back what it should never have held. Old men who have listened to that water all their lives say it sounds different now. And someone in Valdeniebla, someone who was never in the ledger, has started paying a very old debt again.To find out what happened to Julián Salcedo, Laura and Marcos will have to go where the water goes: under the mountain, into the dark, to a chamber that has kept the valley's secrets for two hundred years.What the Water Gives Back is the second book in the Valdeniebla trilogy, an atmospheric small-town mystery with a supernatural edge. It can be read on its own, but is best enjoyed after The Guardian of the Lake.