I interviewed Paula Hawkins shortly after that book came out. It was already at #1 in the United Kingdom and was quickly breaking out over here. At the time she seemed overwhelmed by it all. She said that during the period when she had been writing “The Girl on the Train” she had been under severe financial duress.
Hawkins had been a journalist. She had written four unsuccessful romance novels under the pen name of “Amy Silver.” She decided to take a different approach-so she penned her first thriller. After she published “The Girl on the Train,” her financial concerns vanished.
How does an author who has had the best selling book in America for over two years top or even equal that effort? It seems like an impossible task. Dan Brown experienced the same problem when he tried to do a followup to his blockbuster “The Da Vinci Code.”
Hawkins just published her new thriller “Into the Water.” Readers who are expecting a book comparable to “The Girl on the Train” are in for a huge surprise. This book is quite different.
The story takes place in an English riverside village. There’s a spot along the river the locals call the Drowning Pool. There’s a cliff high above it. Women have been drowning in this place for years. Why is that? Centuries ago women accused of witchcraft had been violently submerged there by their accusers.
The dark history of the Drowning Pool was still being written. As “Into the Water” begins another woman has just died there. She had grown up in the town and was the single mother of a teen-aged daughter. They had been living in a house along the river-she had been researching the history of the Drowning Pool.
A few weeks before that her daughter’s best friend had also been found drowned in that spot. Did these women jump to their deaths? Or, were they pushed? Jules, the sister of the woman who has just died returns to the village to take care of her niece and to deal with her sister’s estate.
The niece displays a lot of anger toward her aunt. The two sisters had been estranged. The woman who has just died had been trying to contact her sister and leaving urgent messages that had never gotten any response. “Into the Water” is told through the rippling story lines of about a dozen characters.
A local policeman is very aware of the Drowning Pool. When he was a boy and his father had been the village constable his mother drowned there. What really happened to these women? This story is as dark at the waters in the Drowning Pool. This reviewer found it strangely compelling.
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