The Dredge

• Author: Brendan Flaherty
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: March 4, 2024
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media

Thank you to libro.fm and Dreamscape Media for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am offering my honest opinion voluntarily.

CONTENT WARNING: murder of a dog (on-page and moderately graphic), murder, mention of sexual abuse of a child (off-page), violence

In Brendan Flaherty’s debut novel, two estranged brothers must confront the violence of the past when they find out a pond where they played as children will be dredged.

After some traumatic teenaged years in rural Connecticut, Cale and Ambrose Casey had nothing left to say to each other. Cale ran off to Hawaii to sell luxury real estate. Ambrose stayed behind and built up his construction company. Neither thought they’d be in touch again and were glad for it—until they learned of a real estate developer’s plan to drain and expand Gibbs Pond.

Nearly 30 years before, the Casey brothers buried a secret in that pond, which fell somewhere between self-defense and family preservation. Lily Rowe, the contractor in charge of the dredging, can also trace her roots—and her trauma—to the banks of Gibbs Pond.

After a childhood that saw her and her brother yanked across the country by her abusive father, it was here where she finally stayed put, even if they didn’t. But as ambitious as Lily is, and as much as she wants answers of her own, her family also has secrets to protect. 

Now, the haunted lives of Cale, Ambrose, and Lily collide once more as they reunite to unearth the devastation of the past.

A small town mystery with long-buried family secrets and messy families is pretty much irresistible for me. So I couldn’t pass this one up. It’s a relatively short audiobook, but it still took me a few days to finish it. Here’s my thoughts on this one, since I had some things I liked and some things I didn’t about the story.

First of all, I was blown away by the writing in this story. The author has a wonderful way with words, and his writing is fantastic. There’s a lot of dialogue in the story and it felt natural and comfortable. His main characters are all damaged, traumatized people, and it shows. They’ve tried to move on in their own ways, but as their hidden secrets are closer to being brought to light, they realize they haven’t moved on as much as they thought. Consequently, none of the main characters are purely good or bad, but they’re firmly in the morally gray camp.

However, there’s one specific scene in the story that really turned me off on the book. To be honest, if I knew that this was going to be in the book, I wouldn’t have read it. There’s a scene in which a friendly family dog is hurt purposely and dies slowly and painfully. I don’t typically get triggered by material in books, but I don’t like reading graphic scenes involving harm to animals, and this was a particularly upsetting scene. Personally, I would have much preferred a warning about this in the beginning. 

As for the plot, it felt like there was a lot packed into such a short book. The mystery wasn’t so much of a mystery, since it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on. I appreciated the way the author didn’t delve into the gorier details of what was happening to the kids in the story, since it avoided feeling like trauma porn, but I would have liked it more if the author did the same for the harm to the dog in the story as well. This was more of a low-stakes mystery, since everything had occurred so far in the past, even though none of the characters were really able to move on. I struggled to really stay invested after the scene with the dog, so the scenes that wrapped everything up kind of escaped me, but overall, this wasn’t one that really worked for me, even though the author has great potential.

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