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

Review: A SLOW FIRE BURNING, Paula Hawkins

• 
  format (Kindle): an e-book from Amazon
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08PC3SZHX
• Publisher: ‎ Riverhead Books (August 31, 2021)
  
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 31, 2021
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 316 pages

Synopsis (Amazon)

When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women who knew him. 

Laura is the troubled one-night-stand last seen in the victim’s home. 

Carla is his grief-stricken aunt, already mourning the recent death of yet another family member. 

And Miriam is the nosy neighbor clearly keeping secrets from the police. 

Three women with separate connections to the victim. Three women who are – for different reasons – simmering with resentment. Who are, whether they know it or not, burning to right the wrongs done to them. When it comes to revenge, even good people might be capable of terrible deeds. How far might any one of them go to find peace? How long can secrets smolder before they explode into flame?

My Take

Three women looking for revenge for personal tragedies; and in the end, who killed who? One of those books where you are not sure whether you've actually got it right. Eventually two gruesome murders that look similar, but couldn't possibly be committed by the same person.

The author sets the reader a considerable challenge by introducing numerous characters—Irene, Deidre, Laura, Miriam, Daniel (dead), Carla, Theo, Angela (dead)—all of whom live or lived in a very small geographical area and have overlapping connections and reasons to be furious at each other. What has happened to each of them is fleshed out in a series of flashbacks.

An excellent read.

My rating: 4.7

I've also read

4.9, THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

Review: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, Paula Hawkins - audio book

• Narrated by: Clare Corbett, India Fisher, Louise Brealey
• Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins 
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Release Date: 15 January 2015
• Publisher: Random House Audiobooks
• debut title
• available from Audible 

Synopsis  (Audible)

Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. 'Jess and Jason', she calls them. Their life - as she sees it - is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy.

And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she's only watched from afar. Now they'll see; she's much more than just the girl on the train...

My Take:

This story is told by three narrators who identify themselves at the beginning of a chapter by just saying their name. The producer of the audio version has replicated these narrators by using three  readers with distinct voices. That means "reading" it as an audio novel is probably not the best strategy, particularly as the time frame zig zags, with some narrators playing "catch up", so the reader is really never sure when events occurred, in relation to each other. With an audio novel you don't have the opportunity that a hard copy gives you of being able to flip back a few pages to check on a date or who is speaking. I suspect that if I had been reading a hard copy I might even have been tempted to write dates down and group events around them.

Add to that the fact that the principal narrator, Rachel, who is the "girl on the train", is an alcoholic and is frequently drunk. The police sum it up when they say that her evidence is unreliable. Rachel herself is the first to admit this because there are great holes in her memory. She has flashbacks in the form of dreams, and she is never sure whether they are things she has actually seen or whether it is her imagination at work. However as she begins to "dry out" bits of her memory returns. All she has to do is work out which memories to trust.

Rachel has lost her job in London because she came back from lunch drunk, having insulted one of her firm's biggest clients. She has been keeping up the pretence of going to work on the train so her flatmate will not know that she has no income.  She desperately wants to be accepted by people, and to overcome her feelings of rejection by her ex-husband. At night when she is drunk she tends to ring him in the middle of the night and even turns up at his house, where she also used to live, and frightens his new wife by taking their baby out of the bassinet. Just coincidentally their house is just a few doors down from the house where "Jess and Jason" live.

And then she sees something from the train which changes all their lives forever.

So it is a novel that really makes the reader work alongside Rachel at solving the mystery.

A number of reviewers have remarked on what a remarkable accomplishment the novel is, and I tend to agree. I have to list it among my best reads for this year.

My rating: 4.9

About the author
Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction.
Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. The Girl on the Train is her first thriller.