Into the water
by Paula Hawkins

---

From the publisher

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train returns with Into the Water, her addictive new novel of psychological suspense.

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

---

My Review

I had to restart the audio after about an hour because I kept losing track of which character was supposed to be speaking. After a while I got better of keeping it straight but occasionally had to refer back to the chapter titles to re-orient myself in the narrative.

Hawkins does a good job of making each character’s voice and worldview unique while still obscuring their motives until she’s ready for the big reveal. I would hesitate to call anything that happens a “twist” in the traditional sense, it’s just that the fog clears little by little until we get a clearer picture of what happened.

The themes of trauma, grief, troublesome women and dangerous men are trodden paths here and I hesitate to say she does anything truly new with the material, but it was a decent listen.

---