Into the Water - Paula Hawkins

One of my reading challenge categories this year is a Goodreads Choice Awards Winner, and Into the Water won the category of "Mystery & Thriller" for 2017.  I also already had it as a Book of the Month extra, since I had enjoyed The Girl on the Train. 

The story here centers around a pair of drownings in a small English town.  Told from the perspectives of a multitude of characters, the plot tries to unravel what really happened with these drownings, who is responsible, etc.

This was not as good a book as The Girl on the Train.  While the central premise--the Drowning Pool, a place both for suicides and to get rid of difficult women--is hypnotic, there are too many point-of-view characters running around to easily keep straight.  Additionally, despite this being a mystery, there's not really a mystery here.  Why?  Because we're pretty much told who is responsible for the events here early on in the book, practically bludgeoned over the head with it for the duration of the story, and GASP!  It's supposed to be a big reveal!  Of course, there is a little twist at the end, but it was nothing earth-shaking or life-shattering.

One thing that Hawkins does get right here is atmosphere.  The small town, the rain, the river, the pool, the way that Jules speaks to her dead sister, the creepy and decrepit mill house--all of it combines for a very spooky feeling.  This would be a good rainy day read.  Or maybe one for when it's storming and the power goes out and you're reading by candlelight.  None of the characters are very likable, either, which also adds to this.  Now, I don't think that characters necessarily need to be likable for a book to be good, but if you feel differently, you might not like this very much.  The pace is slow, which I think suits the story, though the frenzy of characters sometimes makes it feel faster than it really is.

But ultimately, if this book is supposed to be a suspense or mystery novel, it fails.  As I mentioned before, the end is put out there very early on, and the little "twist" can easily be inferred from what we're outright told.  With that in mind, the book is too long by far, because we spend all of it watching the characters bumble around going "Whaaaat?" and wanting to smack them upside the head for their blindness.  By the time someone finally put it together, I was ready to drown the lot of them in the same river that was causing all of the problems.

Overall, not as good, shocking, or suspenseful as I had hoped.  The atmosphere was strong, but not strong enough to sustain the book as a whole.

2 stars out of 5.