Ready to dive into the murky depths of a small Vermont town where tragedy has found its home? Or are you terrified of what lies beyond the still waters of abandoned quarries and the statues that surround them? Fifty Feet Down by Sophie Tanen tosses you right over the edge into a story filled with sapphic pining, mystery, and tragic familial backstories.
Title: Fifty Feet Down
Author: Sophie Tanen
Date of Publication: September 15, 2023
Publisher: Self Published
Genre: Mystery, Sapphic Romance
Trigger Warnings: death, bullying, depression, family member in coma
Synopsis:
In the years since its foundation, the town of West Rutland has been known for one thing only: marble.
Marble houses, marble art, marble people. They were first and foremost a marble town, historically mining from deep, hundred-foot quarries scattered in the woods. Production stopped long ago, though, when thirteen workers were killed in an accident in the 1900s, a taint of death lingering over the heart and soul of the town.
Today, it becomes known for something else, something darker. Four disappearances in the past month, all high school boys yet to be found. That’s all Alex knows when her boss ships her from New York City to Vermont to get the story. That, and the only family member she has left is waiting there, unaware of her existence.
But instead of answers, she only finds more questions in the form of Luna, who, despite working at the local sculpture garden, avoids the topic of marble quarries like the plague, mourning a ghost that no one in town will speak a word about.
The last thing Alex wants is a distraction, but that’s all Luna needs, and together they unravel each other’s secrets one by one, searching for ways in which they might be intertwined. And through it all the quarries wait, where Alex finds Luna on more than one occasion, crumpled on her knees at the edge, staring down into fifty feet of haunted water.
Fifty Feet Down by Sophie Tanen is a book that’s been lurking on my TBR since before it even had a cover. What can I say, Sophie had a fantastic marketing campaign and clawed her way into my sapphic New Englander heart from the start. I start with this so you understand my pure excitement for the story, and that my expectations for a genre I rarely read might have been a bit off.
That is not to say that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this story or the writing, I genuinely did. But for someone whose main genres tend to be horror, fantasy, or romance, this murder mystery was way out of my comfort zone. Make it over 500 pages long> Yeah, my excitement crashed and burned for a portion of the story. We follow Alex, a sapphic journalist looking for a way to connect with her recently discovered half-brother after her father’s death. To do so, she moves to the small Vermont town he lives in to write about a group of missing teen boys. Great, perfect. She then immediately goes into full-blown sapphic pining mode over a local artist. Perfect, love a good immediate infatuation energy.
The struggle I had with this is that I thought the mystery took a back seat during the early to middle portion of the book. It gave way for a sweet sapphic romance to thrive, and we slowly found out some crucial information and family dynamics, but there were moments I was left wondering if we would ever find out more about the missing boys. I’m not sure if this was a choice to elongate the pacing and rack up suspense, but it personally didn’t work for me.
Now that we’ve gotten what didn’t work for me out of the way, let’s talk about what I enjoyed.
I preface this with the fact that this book is self-published so while that is typically a plus for me, it is not for everyone. Now, just because I say this was self-published, don’t doubt the writing as it was beautifully done. I am someone who loves floral, descriptive, and poetic language, especially around romantic and serious moments. Sophie Tanen delivered on the beautiful language. She is truly an artist, and you can feel the adoration leaking off the pages. Her prose was beautiful, the story structure overall was well organized, and I’m impressed by the threads that are woven throughout the book.
Speaking of threads, that twist ending was one I never saw coming. This might just be because I am a mystery novice, but I was left guessing until the very end. Were the main character’s detective skills all that present throughout the book? No, there’s no room for detective work when there is sapphic pining to be had. But the direction that Alex led readers to in comparison to what the actual answer was, was shocking, to say the least.
Overall, the characters were well developed and lovingly crafted, the writing was lyrical when it worked and straightforward when it needed to be, the small-town setting felt like coming home, and the ending had a well-developed twist. Despite the issues I had with the pacing and weight of romance to mystery, this was a solid sapphic romantic mystery. Maybe this is not the story for those hard-hitting mystery junkies, but it was a solid and accessible intro to the mystery genre.
I would recommend it for those interested in a lot of small-town romance sprinkled into a story about what links the disappearance of a group of local teenage boys together in the dark depths of local quarries.