INTO THE WATER

Women in a small British town have been drowning since 1679.

“No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.” So sayeth the town psychic in Hawkins’ (The Girl on the Train, 2015) follow-up to her smash-hit debut. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here to match the sharp characterization of the alcoholic commuter at the center of that story. Here the central character—Danielle Abbott, an award-winning writer and photographer who's also the single mother of a teenager—has already died. At the time of her watery demise, she was working on a coffee-table book about the spot the people of Beckford call the Drowning Pool, once her “place of ecstasy,” where she learned to swim, now her grave. She left behind a pile of typewritten pages and a daughter whose best friend also drowned just a few months ago. Danielle's estranged sister, Jules, returns to town to identify the body, relive the distressing past that led her to flee this creepy place, and try to deal with her snotty, grieving niece, Lena. Many of the neighbor families are also down a member via the pool, and even after you’ve managed to untangle all the willfully misleading information, half-baked subplots, and myriad characters, you’re going to have a tough time keeping it straight. The spunkiest voice belongs to a somewhat tangential policewoman who probably should have been the narrator. “Seriously,” she comments, “how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It’s like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head.”

Let's call it sophomore slump and hope for better things.