A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins: A review

 

Paula Hawkins had a best seller with her 2015 thriller The Girl on the Train. That book featured a damaged female protagonist. Perhaps on the theory that more is better, her new thriller features not one but three damaged female protagonists. And all of them are suspects in a murder.

The murder victim is one Daniel Sutherland whose body is found on his scuzzy houseboat moored on Regent's Canal in London. He had been stabbed and blood is everywhere including on a set of keys lying near the body. His neighbor from the next houseboat over finds the body when she notices his door open when she is out. For whatever reason, she picks up the keys and takes them with her.

That neighbor is named Miriam and as the discoverer of the body, she is immediately on the police's radar as a potential murderer. As we get to know Miriam, we find that she actually had a tenuous connection to the family of the murdered young man but it is not a happy connection. She is full of resentment and a desire for revenge over a wrong that was done to her, one that has blighted her life. Miriam had written a book and she asked a local author to read it. Well, he read it all right, but he appropriated the plot for his own work which became a best seller. (For some reason, the purloined plot seems to be a very popular plot device for writers this year.) That local author was the murder victim's uncle by marriage.

His aunt is Carla who is our second damaged protagonist. She, too, is full of resentment and anger. Years earlier she had suffered a heart-rending family tragedy, one from which she has never been able to recover and which continues to haunt her every day. She and her husband, the author, are no longer together, and a few weeks earlier her sister, Daniel's mother, accidentally(?) fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck. She died instantly. And now, Daniel. Eventually, we learn that Daniel and his mother were at the center of the tragedy that Carla endured. Has she had her revenge?

Finally, we have Laura Kilbride, a young woman with whom Daniel had a one-night stand. It was her keys that were found by his body, but, of course, the police don't know that because Miriam didn't turn them over. When Laura was a child, she suffered a terrible accident that has left her damaged both physically and psychologically. These problems reveal themselves through a serious limp and her aggressive outbursts, short-term memory lapses, poor impulse control, and inappropriate social behavior. She feels low (or no) self-worth. Truly, she is one messed-up young woman.

In spite of the tragedies that have damaged their lives, it is somehow difficult to work up much empathy for any of these women. They are all essentially self-serving and narcissistic. Hawkins' narrative leads the reader to suspect one of the flawed characters before taking us in a completely different direction that seems to lead to one of the others and I admit I did not really anticipate the plot twist that she had devised for us at the end. The message of that ending seems to be that trauma can unravel a person's life if it isn't confronted and allowed to heal. And the damage from it can finally manifest itself in strange ways. Such as murder.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins: A review

I found this book to be a bit of a hot mess and something of a disappointment after The Girl on the Train which was fairly meticulously plotted. Into the Water, on the other hand, is all over the place with more than a dozen different narrators with their own points of view. Scattered hardly begins to describe it.

Part of the problem may have been due to the fact that I listened to the audio version of this book while on a road trip. Perhaps I would have been able to understand the transitions better had I seen them on a printed page, since I am more of a visual learner. As it was, I found jumping around from narrator to narrator every few minutes confusing and hard to follow. 

Into the Water is set in the small rural town of Beckford, England, a place with a long history of very bad treatment of its women, beginning with drowning troublesome women as witches back in the seventeenth century. The town is built on cliffs beside a river with a bridge and a "drowning pool." All of these features have played their parts in the killing or disappearance of those troublesome women through the centuries.  

The action of the novel includes flashbacks to some of the earlier horrific events but the main action takes place over the course of one month, August 2015. Nel Abbott, a local writer who had been working on a history about the drowning pool, herself goes "into the water." She falls from the cliff overlooking the drowning pool. Her death is thought to be a suicide, but there are those who know or suspect differently.

A few months earlier, another woman - or rather a teenager named Katie Whittaker - had also gone into the water and her death also was put down as a suicide. There is a connection between Katie and Nel and her name is Lena. She is Nel's fifteen-year-old daughter and Katie's best friend. She knew Katie's secrets.

Nel also had a sister named Julia (annoyingly called Jules) from whom she had been estranged for many years. Julia (I refuse to call her Jules) had not spoken to her sister for eight years, even though Nel had called her repeatedly, especially just before her death, and left messages begging her to call because she had information for her. After Nel's death, Julia descends on the house and the niece that she doesn't know and determines to take them in hand.

The detective assigned to the case is Sean Townsend, who, naturally, also has a connection to the drowning pool. His mother had died there when he was just a six-year-old child. He had supposedly witnessed her death, after which he was left alone with a brutal father, Patrick, also a policeman, who is still alive, living in a house across the courtyard from his son and still dominating his life. Does no one consider that it might just be a wee bit inappropriate to have Sean investigating a death so closely resembling that of his mother? 

Sean is married to Helen, whom his father selected for him. She is head of the local school. There doesn't actually seem to be much of a marriage there. Does Helen live with Sean or with Patrick? Patrick is certainly devoted to her.

Sean's partner in the investigation is Detective Sergeant Erin Morgan, who is the only sympathetic character in the novel, at least for me. Erin actually seems to be a real human being and, even though everyone involved in the case attempts to mislead her, she does begin to tease out the history of the Beckford events and to understand what had happened there. I foresee a bright future for her as an investigator.

Oh, there are so many other characters: Katie's parents, especially her mother Louise; Katie's brother, Josh; a teacher at the local school, Mark Henderson; a psychic named Nickie Sage; a 17th century victim named Libby, etc., etc., etc. And we hear narration from ALL of them! Repeatedly. There's very little actual dialogue - just characters giving us their versions of conversations.

Moreover, Paula Hawkins has been unnecessarily confusing in her telling of the tale, obfuscating events in order to build suspense. Her characters do not behave logically or with any apparent motive. They just lurch about without any discernible plan in mind. 

All that being said, at the very end of her book, Hawkins does manage to tie things together a bit. Her denouement is almost Hitchcockian in its delivery.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: A review

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Shades of Gone Girl and Gaslight, this is one nifty page-turner of a thriller. Paula Hawkins has used the device of the unreliable narrative and lying narrator made famous by Gillian Flynn in her fantastically successful Gone Girl and used it with great ingenuity to tight and suspenseful effect. It was a very entertaining read.

This is the story of three women - Rachel, Megan, and Anna. Each of the three shares in the narration of the story and so we see it from three different perspectives, but as we near the denouement, we begin to comprehend that none of the narratives has been entirely true. Certainly, none of the three is complete in itself.

The woman who we first meet is that "girl on the train." She is Rachel. She takes the same commuter train to London every morning, allegedly to go to her job at a public relations firm. Only slowly is it revealed that she has actually lost her job because of her drinking three months before. She continues taking her daily trip to fool her flatmate whom she doesn't want to know about the job loss.

As Rachel takes her daily trip to and from London, she rolls by a stretch of cozy suburban homes, one of which she used to live in with her husband, Tom. She was blissfully happy there until alcohol took over her life and Tom strayed into the arms of another woman, Anna. Now, he and Anna live in the house that he and Rachel once occupied and as she goes by each day, Rachel looks down on the house and remembers.

She also observes a nearby house where a young couple, whom she has named Jason and Jess but who are actually Scott and Anna, live. Rachel sees them as happy and in love, the perfect young marrieds. The truth is very much more complicated than that, as we learn when we meet Megan through her narrative.

One day as she is passing by, Rachel sees Jess (Megan) on her patio kissing another man who is not Jason (Scott) and she is shocked. Could she have been wrong about their lives?

She is even more shocked when she reads in the newspaper that the woman who lived at that address has disappeared without a trace - the day after she saw her kissing a man not her husband. Is there a connection?

While these events are happening, Rachel's life and her tentative hold on reality are unraveling completely. Her flatmate is fed up with her drinking and there is a black hole in her memory of the day that Megan disappeared. Rachel wakes the day after to find herself with unexplained injuries and unable to remember what happened, but she has a vague memory of being in the area where the woman disappeared.

Then the woman's body is found near the railroad tracks and Rachel is even more desperate to remember what happened during her blackout. She fears that she may be somehow involved in Megan's death.

Meanwhile, Anna is becoming fed up with Rachel and what she sees as her meddling in the lives of Anna, Tom, and their young daughter. She sees her as a stalker and a danger to her child.

Rachel, in an alcoholic haze, is torn about what she observed of Megan from the train and what she thinks she knows about her life and that of Scott and the unknown man on the patio. When she finally works up her courage to tell the police, they at first accept and investigate her statement but then reach the conclusion that her observations are not to be trusted because she is a drunk. She is humiliated once again.

This book has a lot of moving parts, but as we get near the end they all come together and take on the speed and force of a runaway locomotive. Paula Hawkins keeps all of the disparate lines of her complicated tale from becoming inextricably tangled and all the lies, innuendos, and threats eventually are revealed for what they are in a most satisfactory conclusion. It is a very impressive accomplishment.


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