Book Review: Into the Water

Title: Into the Water

Author: Paula Hawkins

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Year: 2017

Pages: 386

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Rating: 3 stars

One sentence summary: Two women's deaths in the Drowning Pool spark an investigation into the lives of the town's residents.

A full synopsis of this book can be found on Goodreads.

Spoiler Level: None

I'm a little disappointed with this one, especially since I really enjoyed Hawkins' first novel, The Girl on the Train. This book wasn't terrible by any means, and it showed a lot of promise, but it didn't blow me away. The story revolves around the mystery of two women's deaths in The Drowning Pool, a river that runs through the town of Beckford. It is told through multiple POVs (nine in total) and includes pages from a character's manuscript. While the multiple perspectives were confusing at first, once I pieced all the relationships together I had no problem. My issue came down to the necessity of all the point of views, because at least one or two didn't add much to the story at all. While the inclusion of manuscript pages was interesting, I also feel that they didn't add much to the story, other than atmosphere. if this was a more thrilling novel, these breaks could have helped prolong the tension, but because I felt no tension these breaks only needlessly lengthened and padded out the story in my opinion. The quality of writing itself was great, I just wasn't a huge fan of the structure the author uses. This book was extremely slow and never seemed to pick up the pace, even at the climax. I was never scared for the characters and I was never shocked by the revelations. Most of the reveals were pretty obvious in my opinion and they weren't "twists" as you find in a psychological thriller. Other viewers have commented that this book falls more on the domestic side of a domestic thriller and I agree. It seemed to be less about the mystery, and more about the ways each resident of the town is connected through the river and the deaths that have occurred there. Interlocking relationships and a quiet, slow story can work if the characters are likeable, but here they are not. I didn't find most of them intensely unlikeable, but neither did I find many of them extremely compelling. Most of them were bland and I felt nearly no compassion or interest for any of them, perhaps because each character gets so little screen time. For me, this was just average, but I can see how others might enjoy this more. I enjoyed the writing and the concept was intriguing, but it wasn't as compelling or shocking as I'd hoped it would be.