Into the Water

The River Remembers

Paula Hawkins followed one of the decade’s biggest debut thrillers with a sophomore novel that took genuine structural risks. Where The Girl on the Train worked through three tightly focused female perspectives, Into the Water multiplies its viewpoints to eleven — a choice that generates both the novel’s distinctive atmosphere and its most significant problems.

The Drowning Pool in the small English market town of Beckford has a long history: women suspected of witchcraft, women who got in the way, women whose deaths were conveniently ruled accidents or suicides. When Nel Abbott, who was writing a book about the Pool’s historical victims, turns up dead in its waters, her sister Jules arrives to collect Nel’s teenage daughter and reluctantly begins to understand what her sister was investigating.

Eleven Voices

The multi-perspective structure is Hawkins’s attempt to capture how a small community processes, conceals, and distorts a death. Each narrator has a partial view, a private stake, and a slightly different relationship to the truth. The ambition is clear: no single person can be trusted, so the reader must triangulate toward the facts from eleven imperfect angles.

In practice, the approach creates as many problems as it solves. Some perspectives are considerably more developed than others, and the reader’s investment is repeatedly interrupted just as it begins to build. The mystery’s forward momentum is frequently sacrificed to the demands of the structural scheme.

What Works

The novel’s genuine achievement is atmosphere. Hawkins renders the Beckford Pool and the town around it with a sense of accumulated female suffering that gives the mystery genuine weight beyond its plot mechanics. The historical context — the actual historical record of women drowned as witches — is woven in with skill, and the thematic connection between past and present deaths is the novel’s most interesting argument.

Nel Abbott, reconstructed primarily through other characters’ memories rather than her own narration, is a compelling absent presence: reckless, brilliant, difficult, and perceptive in ways that got her killed. The crime’s eventual logic, when it arrives, is satisfying and honestly prepared.

A Difficult Second Act

Into the Water is the work of a novelist who did not want to repeat herself — who chose to complicate rather than refine her first novel’s approach. The instinct is admirable; the execution is uneven. Readers who want the compression and momentum of The Girl on the Train will need patience. Those willing to sink into the novel’s atmosphere will find rewards that the thriller scaffolding doesn’t fully advertise.

The Burden of Too Many Voices

The central technical gamble of Into the Water is its proliferation of perspectives — eleven narrators sharing the telling of a single small town’s secrets — and it is a gamble that does not fully pay off. Hawkins’s ambition is clear and even admirable: by refracting events through so many partial, self-interested viewpoints, she aims to dramatize how a community collectively conceals and distorts the truth, forcing the reader to assemble the facts from a chorus of unreliable accounts. In practice, the sheer number of voices dilutes the suspense that her debut had achieved through tight focus. Several narrators are too thinly drawn to register as distinct people, the constant switching interrupts momentum just as it begins to build, and the reader struggles to invest in characters who appear for a few pages and recede. The result is a novel that is structurally interesting but emotionally diffuse, its mystery repeatedly stalled by the demands of its own elaborate scheme. It is the kind of overreach that betrays an author consciously trying not to repeat a winning formula.

The Drowning Pool and Its Ghosts

Where the novel genuinely succeeds is in atmosphere, and its most resonant achievement is the Drowning Pool itself, a stretch of river in the town of Beckford with a long and sinister history. For centuries, Hawkins establishes, this water has claimed women — those accused of witchcraft, those who became inconvenient, those whose deaths were conveniently ruled suicide or accident — and the novel draws a deliberate thematic line connecting this buried history of violence against women to the present-day deaths it investigates. This historical underlayer is the book’s most interesting argument, lending the mystery a weight beyond its plot mechanics and transforming a domestic thriller into something closer to a meditation on how communities dispose of difficult women and then forget they did so. The Pool becomes a kind of accusing presence, a body of water that remembers what the town would rather not, and Hawkins renders it with a brooding power that is the novel’s strongest asset. The atmosphere of accumulated female suffering gives Into the Water a genuine, if unevenly realized, seriousness of purpose.

The Absent Woman at the Center

The novel’s most effective character is, paradoxically, the one who is dead before the story begins. Nel Abbott — the woman whose drowning sets events in motion, and who was herself writing a book about the Pool’s historical victims — is reconstructed entirely through the memories, resentments, and projections of others, and this oblique characterization makes her a compelling absent presence. Reckless, brilliant, difficult, and perceptive in ways that may have cost her life, Nel exists only in the contradictory accounts of those who knew her, so that the reader, like her estranged sister Jules, must piece together who she really was from fragments that rarely agree. This technique — building a vivid character from the negative space of others’ testimony — is one of the book’s more successful experiments, and it connects to the novel’s larger preoccupation with how women are perceived, judged, and silenced. The eventual solution to the mystery, when it arrives, is satisfying and honestly prepared, even if the journey to it is more labored than it needed to be.

An Ambitious, Uneven Follow-Up

Into the Water, published in 2017, carried the immense expectations created by Paula Hawkins’s debut, The Girl on the Train, one of the defining thrillers of its decade, and it has generally been judged the lesser book. The comparison is instructive: where the debut succeeded through ruthless compression and a small cast of intensely realized narrators, the follow-up dissipates its energy across too broad a canvas, sacrificing propulsion for breadth. Yet it would be unfair to dismiss it. Hawkins’s atmospheric command, her interest in the historical mistreatment of women, and her skill at rendering an absent character through others’ eyes all mark it as the work of a serious novelist taking real creative risks rather than coasting on a formula. Readers expecting the relentless momentum of her debut will likely be frustrated; those willing to surrender to the novel’s brooding atmosphere and thematic ambitions will find rewards the thriller machinery does not advertise. It is a flawed but honorable second act, more interesting in its failures than many thrillers are in their successes.

Our rating: 3.7/5 — An atmospheric but overstuffed sophomore thriller whose eleven-narrator structure dilutes its momentum, redeemed by a haunting setting and a serious interest in the historical silencing of women.