Into The Water is drowning in characters

‘the things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.’ - Jules

In Paula Hawkins’ second novel Into The Water  the sudden death of Nel Abbott at the ‘drowning pool’ which she was fascinated by, causes the lives of everyone in Beckford to be put under the microscope.

Suspense is built well in the beginning as we slowly discover the connections between each character and the tortured history of the drowning pool. But these falters when we are given too many characters to care about.

Hawkins must be aware of the overload of characters as she includes a page that details the ‘People of Beckford’ all of whom do play important parts in understanding what caused the death of Nel Abbott. I regularly flipped back to this page as I was getting into the book, so it is a useful tool, but it begs the question of whether such a thing should be needed.

With many characters to choose from, none of them a particularly likeable. From Jules who is bitter about how her sister treated her before she died to Lena whose rude and almost bully like behaviour can’t be outweighed by her being in mourning.  

Even the detectives on the case use cliché police language, which admittedly is something hard to avoid, but continues to give the reader no reason to significantly care about what they have to say, especially Erin, who is new to Beckford. In part, because of this I struggled to find any of the revelations in the novel believable.

Despite the multitude of characters Hawkins is able to make them all link well and even ties up the end of each of the respective stories, which is uncommon.

The only similarity between Into the Water and Hawkins’ debut book Girl on The Train is the chapter format which mixes first person and narration, which I enjoy.

Overall, Paula Hawkins’ second novel can only be marked as satisfactory, but I am still interested in reading more from her.