Part of the problem for me may have been that I listened to the book on audible and rather than one reader, there were multiple readers straining to milk the melodrama from each sentence of Into the Water. For example, “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.” Jules contends with her own past trauma, a ghost or two, the mystery of the present, an understandably-cranky teenager and the town psychic who appears throughout Into the Water every few chapters to mutter glumly to herself much like the homeless lady who I encounter every few days wanting to draw my portrait as a mermaid. I stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind me, my eyes struggling to focus in the gloom I shivered at the sudden cold. Without thinking, I knew that I’d have to shift the door with my hip, at the point where it sticks against the floor. I pushed the front door open, half expecting to hear my mother’s voice calling out to me from the kitchen. I heard the water, and I smelled the earth, the earth in the shadow of the house, underneath the trees, in the places untouched by sunlight, the acrid stink of rotting leaves, and the smell transported me back in time. Jules returns to help Lena, Nel’s daughter, during the investigation. Of course, once Nel is dead, Jules her sister must come back to the Mill House, the place where bad things happened when the two were teens. None of them know but they all take over the narrative long enough to tell you what they don’t know and why.

Not the close-mouthed Detective Inspector or the newly-arrived Detective Sergeant, or the high school principal, or her teacher, or the mother of the fifteen year old who committed suicide in the pool only weeks before. No one quite knows what led Nel Into the Water.

Under the water paula hawkins