I think I’ve read too many thrillers where the author tries too hard to be surprising and throws in an outlandish twist at the last moment, so I’ve come to favor this sort of denouement. For this reason, there isn’t necessarily one shocking reveal at the end: the final chapter is more of a quiet sort of ‘ah, of course’ moment, the last piece settling into place, but I was okay with that. Reading this book is like slowly assembling a jigsaw puzzle – it’s slow at times, but steady, and before you know it you’re completely sucked in and you’ve lost track of time, because you’re so focused on finding the next piece. There are a lot of subplots in this story, but information is consistently revealed at a satisfying pace. I wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery/mysteries, but more importantly, I just enjoyed the ride. Into the Water is cleverly plotted, intricate, and nuanced and sure, I was able to guess a few of the reveals, but some of them came as a surprise. But how many of those women committed suicide, and how many were murdered? When Nel Abbot meets her end there, the mystery surrounding The Drowning Pool takes center stage, as everyone tries to make sense of what happened. Before she died, Nel was working on a project about “The Drowning Pool,” a local piece of lore involving the mysterious deaths of women dating back to the 1700s, all of whom died at the same spot in the river. This brings Jules back to the small town of Beckford where she grew up, and into a complicated web of small town dynamics, packed to the brim with deceit and betrayal. Into the Water begins when Jules Abbot gets a call that her sister Nel is dead, drowned. Into the Water outdoes The Girl on the Train in just about every conceivable way.

(Honestly, I only added Into the Water to this month’s BOTM box because I loved the cover so much.) But I loved this, and if I was secretly expecting Paula Hawkins to rest on her laurels a little bit with her sophomore novel, I was proved very, very wrong.

If anything, I was expecting another entertaining but fairly run of the mill thriller with a predictable outcome.

As someone who liked but didn’t love The Girl on the Train, my expectations for Into the Water weren’t particularly high.

Into the water paula hawkins review