A gone girl; a murky past; a slippery, grey-toned mystery: The last time Paula Hawkins tumbled down this rabbit hole, 20 million readers (and amajor movie adaptation) followed.
Inevitably,Into the Waterarrives with both the burden and privilege of association with one of the biggest pop-literary bombshells of the last decade, and it takes care not to stray far from the moody, through-a-glass-darkly universeThe Girl on the Trainconjured so vividly.
Here though, the canvas has been greatly expanded;Waterpours on no less than 14 narrators, all residents of an otherwise bucolic village in Northern England whose river claims an unusual number of female victims.
Were the two most recent a popular, seemingly untroubled teenager and a fortyish single mother with a not-small list of local enemies simple suicides?
Or is the more sinister truth, as more than one character notes, that Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women?
The books piled-on storylines lack the feverish, almost subdermal intimacy ofTrain, and Hawkins pulp psychology has only the soggiest sort of logic.
Still, buried in her humid narrative is an intriguing pop-feminist tale of small-town hypocrisy, sexual politics, and wrongs that wont rinse clean.B-
