Review: INTO THE WATER, Paula Hawkins

• 
  this large print edition made available by my local library
  
• published by Random House USA 2017
• ISBN 978-0-5254-9620-5
• 532 pages
  

Synopsis (Publisher)

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 Take

 Written from multiple points of view, this novel made me work very hard to ithe action together and to sort the characters out.

Given her preoccupation with the Drowning Pool and her research into its history and the women who had ended their lives there, perhaps it wasn't surprising that Nel Abbott had drowned there. But her sister Jules found it hard to accept and her daughter Lena feels abandoned.

A few weeks earlier Lena's best friend Katie had drowned there too and Katie's parents are grieving and, for some reason, blaming Nel for Katie's death. 

But in the close knit community there are those who don't think Jules should just accept things,

The narrative is interspersed with items that Nel had written as part of here research and a number of the community members add their opinions and narratives. The structure gives the story a rich complexity.

My rating: 4.8 

I've also read

• 4.9, THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN
• 4.7, A SLOW FIRE BURNING